An enhanced social group optimization algorithm for multi-unit production planning.

The multi-unit production planning problem is one of the most challenging optimization tasks with 270 decision variables and multiple constraints. An enhanced social group optimization (ESGO) algorithm to enhance the population diversity of the improving phase and extend of the global scope of exploration through a novel emulation phase in addition to the acquiring phase is developed. ESGO is compared with the original SGO, three of its recent variants and ten modern swarm-intelligent meta-heuristics and delivered better optimality with greater robustness and lower computational times for all the eight cases tested against. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]