An improved league championship algorithm with free search and its application on production scheduling

An improved league championship algorithm with free search (lcafs) is proposed to avoid the drawbacks of basic lca, such as premature convergence, slow convergence speed. the parameters of the algorithm vary linearly along with iteration. a novel match schedule is designed to improve the competition capability for the sport teams. furthermore, the free search operation is introduced to promote the diversity of the league. inspired by the real league degradation, degradation mechanism is used to preserve the team elites. it is convinced by using benchmark functions that lcafs is superior to other compared algorithms in the global searching performance and convergence speed. the proposed algorithm is finally employed as learning method of parameters in neural network to establish the shop floor production scheduling model and achieves good results.