Copyright © 2010 Man Ding et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In order to assist designer in color planning during product development, a novel synthesized evaluation method is presented to evaluate color-combination schemes of multi-working modes products (MMPs). The proposed evaluation method considers color-combination images in different working modes as evaluating attributes, to which the corresponding weights are assigned for synthesized evaluation. Then a mathematical model is developed to search for optimal color-combination schemes of MMP based on the proposed evaluation method and two powerful search techniques known as Evolution Algorithms (EAs) and Swarm Intelligence (SI). In the experiments, we present a comparative study for two EAs, namely, Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Difference Evolution (DE), and one SI algorithm, namely, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), on searching for color-combination schemes of MMP problem. All of the algorithms are evaluated against a test scenario, namely, an Arm-type aerial work platform, which has two working modes. The results show that the DE obtains the superior solution than the other two algorithms for color-combination scheme searching problem in terms of optimization accuracy and computation robustness. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is feasible and efficient.