Progress in Computing Applications Junzhou Huo, Chen Jing, Xu Zhang 5 1 2016 Complex spatial layout design problems contain mutual conflicting objectives and constraints. These types of problems can be divided into several layout sub-problems based on their structure or assemble component. The main difficulties in solving these problems lie in combinational explosion of computational complexity, engineering complexity, and pragmatic approaches in engineering practice. Recently, cooperative co-evolutionary algorithms (CCEA) have proven to be an efficient way to solve complex engineering problems. CCEAs decompose the problem into several subproblems using a cooperative co-evolutionary multi-population architecture. Based on the framework of CCEA, this paper presents a cooperative co-evolutionary method with consistency coordination mechanisms for a complex layout design problem. This method extracts objectives from all technical requirements by analyzing the nonlinear coupling relations among the sub-problems. The method then coordinates consistency among the sub-populations during a coevolution process, and ensures all sub-populations converge on a global consistency objective. Compared with a traditional CCEA method, results show that the proposed method can improve the computational accuracy of solutions. The proposed consistency coordination mechanisms can better reduce the conflicting of the sub-populations and make all the sub-populations sustained coevolve within short runtime.