Evaluation of a Self-Organizing Migrating Algorithm applied to discrete event simulation optimization

The paper deals with testing and evaluation of a modified Self-Organizing Migrating Algorithm (SOMA) applied to a discrete event simulation model reflecting the supply of production lines using automated guided vehicles. The SOMA heuristic optimization method is derived from the Differential Evolution method. We test all the SOMA strategies under the same conditions of the simulation experiments - the same termination criteria, number of repetitions in the optimization experiments, and the same setting of the basic parameters of the SOMA. We propose a methodology using different evaluation criteria to analyse the different SOMA strategies behaviour of finding the optimum of an objective function specified for each discrete event simulation model.