Discretization of emperor penguins colony algorithms with application to modular product design

Modularity concepts attracted the attention of many researchers as it plays an important role in product design problems. Modularity requires dividing a product into a set of modules that are independent between each other and dependent within. The product is represented using Design Structure Matrix (DSM). DSM works as a system representation tool; it visualizes the interrelationship between product elements. In this research, a comparison is conducted between four optimization algorithms: Emperor Penguins Colony (EPC), First Modified Emperor Penguins Colony (MEPC1), Second Modified Emperor Penguins Colony (MEPC2) and Cuckoo Search (CS) optimization algorithms. These four algorithms aim at finding the optimal number of clusters and the optimal assignment of components to clusters, with the objective of minimizing the total coordination cost. Experimental results show that EPC outperforms the other three algorithms. © 2021 Lavoisier. All rights reserved.