A New Genetic Approach for the Partitioning Problem in Distributed Virtual Environment Systems ⋆

Abstract. The Partitioning problem is a key issue in the design of Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) systems based on a server-network architecture. This problem consist of efficiently assigning the clients of the simulation (avatars) to the system servers. Despite the existing literature proposes different evolutive approaches for solving this NP-hard problem, an approach based on genetic algorithms is considered as the current best partitioning mechanism. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the low diversity of the initial population in this algorithm, and we propose a new mechanism for generating initial populations of higher quality. We also propose a new set of crossover methods oriented to problem specifications. Both improvements define a new genetic algorithm that provides better solutions than any other existing approach, in terms of both quality function and execution time.