10,055 research outputs found
Ant colony optimisation and local search for bin-packing and cutting stock problems
The Bin Packing Problem and the Cutting Stock Problem are two related classes of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. Exact solution methods can only be used for very small instances, so for real-world problems, we have to rely on heuristic methods. In recent years, researchers have started to apply evolutionary approaches to these problems, including Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Programming. In the work presented here, we used an ant colony optimization (ACO) approach to solve both Bin Packing and Cutting Stock Problems. We present a pure ACO approach, as well as an ACO approach augmented with a simple but very effective local search algorithm. It is shown that the pure ACO approach can compete with existing evolutionary methods, whereas the hybrid approach can outperform the best-known hybrid evolutionary solution methods for certain problem classes. The hybrid ACO approach is also shown to require different parameter values from the pure ACO approach and to give a more robust performance across different problems with a single set of parameter values. The local search algorithm is also run with random restarts and shown to perform significantly worse than when combined with ACO
Comparing several heuristics for a packing problem
Packing problems are in general NP-hard, even for simple cases. Since now
there are no highly efficient algorithms available for solving packing
problems. The two-dimensional bin packing problem is about packing all given
rectangular items, into a minimum size rectangular bin, without overlapping.
The restriction is that the items cannot be rotated. The current paper is
comparing a greedy algorithm with a hybrid genetic algorithm in order to see
which technique is better for the given problem. The algorithms are tested on
different sizes data.Comment: 5 figures, 2 tables; accepted: International Journal of Advanced
Intelligence Paradigm
2D multi-objective placement algorithm for free-form components
This article presents a generic method to solve 2D multi-objective placement
problem for free-form components. The proposed method is a relaxed placement
technique combined with an hybrid algorithm based on a genetic algorithm and a
separation algorithm. The genetic algorithm is used as a global optimizer and
is in charge of efficiently exploring the search space. The separation
algorithm is used to legalize solutions proposed by the global optimizer, so
that placement constraints are satisfied. A test case illustrates the
application of the proposed method. Extensions for solving the 3D problem are
given at the end of the article.Comment: ASME 2009 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences &
Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, San Diego : United
States (2009
Optimal Recombination in Genetic Algorithms
This paper surveys results on complexity of the optimal recombination problem
(ORP), which consists in finding the best possible offspring as a result of a
recombination operator in a genetic algorithm, given two parent solutions. We
consider efficient reductions of the ORPs, allowing to establish polynomial
solvability or NP-hardness of the ORPs, as well as direct proofs of hardness
results
A study on exponential-size neighborhoods for the bin packing problem with conflicts
We propose an iterated local search based on several classes of local and
large neighborhoods for the bin packing problem with conflicts. This problem,
which combines the characteristics of both bin packing and vertex coloring,
arises in various application contexts such as logistics and transportation,
timetabling, and resource allocation for cloud computing. We introduce
evaluation procedures for classical local-search moves, polynomial variants of
ejection chains and assignment neighborhoods, an adaptive set covering-based
neighborhood, and finally a controlled use of 0-cost moves to further diversify
the search. The overall method produces solutions of good quality on the
classical benchmark instances and scales very well with an increase of problem
size. Extensive computational experiments are conducted to measure the
respective contribution of each proposed neighborhood. In particular, the
0-cost moves and the large neighborhood based on set covering contribute very
significantly to the search. Several research perspectives are open in relation
to possible hybridizations with other state-of-the-art mathematical programming
heuristics for this problem.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figure
Augmented neural networks and problem-structure based heuristics for the bin-packing problem
In this paper, we apply the Augmented-neural-networks (AugNN) approach for solving the classical bin-packing problem (BPP). AugNN is a metaheuristic that combines a priority- rule heuristic with the iterative search approach of neural networks to generate good solutions fast. This is the first time this approach has been applied to the BPP. We also propose a decomposition approach for solving harder BPP, in which sub problems are solved using a combination of AugNN approach and heuristics that exploit the problem structure. We discuss the characteristics of problems on which such problem-structure based heuristics could be applied. We empirically show the effectiveness of the AugNN and the decomposition approach on many benchmark problems in the literature. For the 1210 benchmark problems tested, 917 problems were solved to optimality and the average gap between the obtained solution and the upper bound for all the problems was reduced to under 0.66% and computation time averaged below 33 seconds per problem. We also discuss the computational complexity of our approach
On three soft rectangle packing problems with guillotine constraints
We investigate how to partition a rectangular region of length and
height into rectangles of given areas using
two-stage guillotine cuts, so as to minimize either (i) the sum of the
perimeters, (ii) the largest perimeter, or (iii) the maximum aspect ratio of
the rectangles. These problems play an important role in the ongoing Vietnamese
land-allocation reform, as well as in the optimization of matrix multiplication
algorithms. We show that the first problem can be solved to optimality in
, while the two others are NP-hard. We propose mixed
integer programming (MIP) formulations and a binary search-based approach for
solving the NP-hard problems. Experimental analyses are conducted to compare
the solution approaches in terms of computational efficiency and solution
quality, for different objectives
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