Developing Efficient Metaheuristics for Communication Network Problems by using Problem-specific Knowledge

Metaheuristics, such as evolutionary algorithms or simulated annealing, are widely applicable heuristic optimization strategies that have shown encouraging results for a large number of difficult optimization problems. To show high performance, metaheuristics need to be adapted to the properties of the problem at hand. This paper illustrates how efficient metaheuristics can be developed for communication network problems by utilizing problem-specific knowledge for the design of a high-quality problem representation. The minimum communication spanning tree (MCST) problem finds a communication spanning tree that connects all nodes and satisfies their communication requirements for a minimum total cost. An investigation into the properties of the problem reveals that optimum solutions are similar to the minimum spanning tree (MST). Consequently, a problem-specific representation, the link biased (LB) encoding, is developed, which represents trees as a list of floats. The LB encoding makes use of the knowledge that optimum solutions are similar to the MST, and encodes trees that are similar to the MST with a higher probability. Experimental results for different types of metaheuristics show that metaheuristics using the LB-encoding efficiently solve existing MCST problem instances from the literature, as well as randomly generated MCST problems of different sizes and types

On the Optimal Communication Spanning Tree Problem

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New genetic algorithm approach for the min-degree constrained minimum spanning tree

A novel approach is proposed for the NP-hard min-degree constrained minimum spanning tree (md-MST). The NP-hardness of the md-MST demands that heuristic approximations are used to tackle its intractability and thus an original genetic algorithm strategy is described using an improvement of the Martins-Souza heuristic to obtain a md-MST feasible solution, which is also presented. The genetic approach combines the latter improvement with three new approximations based on different chromosome representations for trees that employ diverse crossover operators. The genetic versions compare very favourably with the best known results in terms of both the run time and obtaining better quality solutions. In particular, new lower bounds are established for instances with higher dimensions.info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersio

On the Bias and Performance of the Edge-Set Encoding

The edge-set encoding is a direct encoding for trees which directly represents trees as sets of edges. In contrast to indirect representations, where usually standard operators are applied to a list of strings and the resulting phenotype is constructed by an appropriate genotype-phenotype mapping, encoding-specific initialization, crossover, and mutation operators have been developed for the edge-set encoding, which are directly applied to trees. There are two different variants of operators: heuristic versions that consider the weights of the edges and non-heuristic versions. An investigation into the bias of the different variants of the operators shows that the heuristic variants are biased towards the minimum spanning tree (MST), that means solutions similar to the MST are favored. In contrast, non-heuristic versions are unbiased. The performance of edgesets is investigated for the optimal communication spanning tree (OCST) problem. Results are presented for randomly created problems as well as for test instances from the literature. Although optimal solutions for the OCST problem are similar to the MST, evolutionary algorithms using the heuristic crossover operator fail if the optimal solution is only slightly different from the MST. The non-heuristic version shows similar performance as the network random key encoding, which is an unbiased indirect encoding and is used as a benchmark. With proper parameter setting the heuristic version of the mutation operator shows good results for the OCST problem as it can make use of the fact that optimal solutions of the OCST problem are similar to the MST. The results suggest that the heuristic crossover operator of the edge-set encoding should not be used for tree problems as its bias towards the MST is too strong

A genetic algorithm for power distribution system planning

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University.The planning of distribution systems consists in determining the optimum site and size of new substations and feeders in order to satisfy the future power demand with minimum investment and operational costs and an acceptable level of reliability. This problem is a combinatorial, non-linear and constrained optimization problem. Several solution methods based on genetic algorithms have been reported in the literature; however, some of these methods have been reported with applications to small systems while others have long solution time. In addition, the vast majority of the developed methods handle planning problems simplifying them as single-objective problems but, there are some planning aspects that can not be combined into a single scalar objective; therefore, they require to be treated separately. The cause of these shortcomings is the poor representation of the potential solutions and their genetic operators This thesis presents the design of a genetic algorithm using a direct representation technique and specialized genetic operators for power distribution system expansion planning problems. These operators effectively preserve and exploit critical configurations that contribute to the optimization of the objective function. The constraints of the problems are efficiently handle with new strategies. The genetic algorithm was tested on several theoretical and real large-scale power distribution systems. Problems of network reconfiguration for loss reduction were also included in order to show the potential of the algorithm to resolve operational problems. Both single-objective and multi-objective formulations were considered in the tests. The results were compared with results from other heuristic methods such as ant colony system algorithms, evolutionary programming, differential evolution and other genetic algorithms reported in the literature. From these comparisons it was concluded that the proposed genetic algorithm is suitable to resolve problems of largescale power distribution system planning. Moreover, the algorithm proved to be effective, efficient and robust with better performance than other previous methods.National Council for Science and Technology, Mexic

Optimisation of piping network design for district cooling system

A district cooling system (DeS) is a.scheme for centralised cooling energy distribution which takes advantage of economies of scale and load diversity. . A cooling medium (chilled water) is generated at a central refrigeration plant and then supplied to a district area, comprising multiple buildings, through a closed-loop piping circuit. Because of the substantial capital investment involved, an optimal design of the distribution piping . configuration is one of the crucial factors for successful implementation of a district 1'. cooling scheme. Since there. exists an enormous number of different combinations of the piping configuration, it is not feasible to evaluate each individual case using an exhaustive approach. This thesis exammes the problem of determining an optimal distribution piping configuration using a genetic algorithm (GA). In order to estimate the spatial and temporal distribution of cooling loads; the climatic conditions of Hong Kong were investigated and a weather database in the form of a typical meteorological year (TMY) was developed. Detailed thermal modelling of a number of prototypical buildings was carried out to determine benchmark cooling loads. A novel Local Search/Looped Local Search algorithm was developed for finding optimal/near-optimal distribution piping configurations. By means of computational . experiments, it was demonstrated that there is a promising improvement to GA performance by including the Local Search/Looped Local Search algorithm, in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency. The effects on the search performance of a number of parameters were systematically investigated to establish the most effective settings. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the Local Search/Looped Local Search algorithm, a benchmark problem - the optimal communication,spanning tree (OCST) was used for comparison. The results showed that the Looped Local Search method developed in this work was an effective tool for optimal network design of the distribution piping system in DCS, as well as for optimising the OCST problem.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

A Hybrid Optimized Weighted Minimum Spanning Tree for the Shortest Intrapath Selection in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of sensor nodes that need energy efficient routing techniques as they have limited battery power, computing, and storage resources. WSN routing protocols should enable reliable multihop communication with energy constraints. Clustering is an effective way to reduce overheads and when this is aided by effective resource allocation, it results in reduced energy consumption. In this work, a novel hybrid evolutionary algorithm called Bee Algorithm-Simulated Annealing Weighted Minimal Spanning Tree (BASA-WMST) routing is proposed in which randomly deployed sensor nodes are split into the best possible number of independent clusters with cluster head and optimal route. The former gathers data from sensors belonging to the cluster, forwarding them to the sink. The shortest intrapath selection for the cluster is selected using Weighted Minimum Spanning Tree (WMST). The proposed algorithm computes the distance-based Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) of the weighted graph for the multihop network. The weights are dynamically changed based on the energy level of each sensor during route selection and optimized using the proposed bee algorithm simulated annealing algorithm

An Improved Genetic Algorithm for the Large-Scale Rural Highway Network Layout

For the layout problem of rural highway network, which is often characterized by a cluster of geographically dispersed nodes, neither the Prim algorithm nor the Kruskal algorithm can be readily applied, because the calculating speed and accuracy are by no means satisfactory. Rather than these two polynomial algorithms and the traditional genetic algorithm, this paper proposes an improved genetic algorithm. It encodes the minimum spanning trees of large-scale rural highway network layout with Prufer array, a method which can reduce the length of chromosome; it decodes Prufer array by using an efficient algorithm with time complexity o(n) and adopting the single transposition method and orthoposition exchange method, substitutes for traditional crossover and mutation operations, which can effectively overcome the prematurity of genetic algorithm. Computer simulation tests and case study confirm that the improved genetic algorithm is better than the traditional one