An Interactive Evolutionary Algorithm for Ceramic Formula Design

The ceramic industry is a representative traditional industry in Guangdong Province, where its degree of informatization is low, and the design of ceramic formula mainly depends on human experience. To intelligently generate ceramic formulas, two main challenges are raised, i.e., the evaluation of a ceramic formula by actual firing is expensive, and the historical accumulated actual data are limited. To solve this problem, this paper models the ceramic formula design process as an expensive constrained multi-objective optimization problem. Based on the mathematical model, we propose an interactive hybrid metaheuristic evolutionary algorithm, cEDA to optimize the production cost and meanwhile satisfy the category constraints, chemical component constraints and material constraints. It consists of three key components, nondominated sorting, materials selection and proportion allocation to search for qualified ceramic formulas. To incorporate domain expertise, a classification-based interactive optimization method is introduced in cEDA. After two rounds of interaction, the acceptance rate of the generated formulas by the algorithm has increased from 18% to 87.5%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.