An improved multi-objective genetic algorithm for heterogeneous coverage RFID network planning

Recent research has demonstrated the potential benefits of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in the supply chain and production management via its item-level visibility. However, the RFID coverage performance is largely impacted by the surrounding environment and potential collisions between the RFID devices. Thus, through RFID network planning (RNP) to achieve the desired coverage within the budget becomes a key factor for success. In this study, we establish a novel and generic multi-objective RNP model by simultaneously optimising two conflicted objectives with satisfying the heterogeneous coverage requirements. Then, we design an improved multi-objective genetic algorithm (IMOGA) integrating a divide-and-conquer greedy heuristic algorithm to solve the model. We further construct a number of computational cases abstracted from an automobile mixed-model assembly line to illustrate how the proposed model and algorithm are applied in a real RNP application. The results show that the proposed IMOGA achieves highly competitive solutions compared with Pareto optimal solutions and the solutions given by four recently developed well-known multi-objective evolutionary and swarm-based optimisers (SPEA2, NSGA-II, MOPSO and MOPS2O) in terms of solution quality and computational robustness.