The Bidirectional Optimization of Carbon Fiber Production by Neural Network with a GA-IPSO Hybrid Algorithm

A hybrid approach of genetic algorithm (GA) and improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) is proposed to construct the radial basis function neural network (RNN) for real-time optimizing of the carbon fiber manufacture process. For the three-layer RNN, we adopt the nearest neighbor-clustering algorithm to determine the neurons number of the hidden layer. When the appropriate network structure is fixed, we present the GA-IPSO algorithm to tune the parameters of the network, which means the center and the width of the node in the hidden layer and the weight of output layer. We introduce a penalty factor to adjust the velocity and position of the particles to expedite convergence of the PSO. The GA is used to mutate the particles to escape local optimum. Then we employ this network to develop the bidirectional optimization model: in one direction, we take production parameters as input and properties indices as output; in this case, the model is a carbon fiber product performance prediction system; in the other direction, we take properties indices as input and production parameters as output, and at this situation, the model is a production scheme design tool for novel style carbon fiber. Based on the experimental data, the proposed model is compared to the conventional RBF network and basic PSO method; the research results show its validity and the advantages in dealing with optimization problems.