378 research outputs found
Quantitative Analysis and Performance Study of Ant Colony Optimization Models Applied to Multi-Mode Resource Constraint Project Scheduling Problem
Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) belongs to this kind of traditional NP-hard problems with a high impact in both, research and industrial domains. However, due to the complexity that CSP problems exhibit, researchers are forced to use heuristic algorithms for solving the problems in a reasonable time. One of the most famous heuristic al- gorithms is Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. The possible utilization of ACO algorithms to solve CSP problems requires the de- sign of a decision graph where the ACO is executed. Nevertheless, the classical approaches build a graph where the nodes represent the vari- able/value pairs and the edges connect those nodes whose variables are different. In order to solve this problem, a novel ACO model have been recently designed. The goal of this paper is to analyze the performance of this novelty algorithm when solving Multi-Mode Resource-Constraint Satisfaction Problems. Experimental results reveals that the new ACO model provides competitive results whereas the number of pheromones created in the system is drastically reduced
A new ant colony optimization model for complex graph-based problems
Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Escuela Politécnica Superior, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática. Fecha de lectura: julio de 2014Nowadays, there is a huge number of problems that due to their complexity have
employed heuristic-based algorithms to search for near-to-optimal (or even optimal)
solutions. These problems are usually NP-complete, so classical algorithms are not
the best candidates to address these problems because they need a large amount of
computational resources, or they simply cannot find any solution when the problem
grows. Some classical examples of these kind of problems are the Travelling Salesman
Problem (TSP) or the N-Queens problem. It is also possible to find examples in real and
industrial domains related to the optimization of complex problems, like planning,
scheduling, Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP), WiFi network Design Problem (WiFiDP)
or behavioural pattern identification, among others.
Regarding to heuristic-based algorithms, two well-known paradigms are Swarm
Intelligence and Evolutionary Computation. Both paradigms belongs to a subfield
from Artificial Intelligence, named Computational Intelligence that also contains
Fuzzy Systems, Artificial Neural Networks and Artificial Immune Systems areas.
Swarm Intelligence (SI) algorithms are focused on the collective behaviour of selforganizing
systems. These algorithms are characterized by the generation of collective
intelligence from non-complex individual behaviour and the communication schemes
amongst them. Some examples of SI algorithms are particle swarm optimization, ant
colony optimization (ACO), bee colony optimization o bird flocking.
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) are based on the foraging behaviour of these insects.
In these kind of algorithms, the ants take different decisions during their execution
that allows them to build their own solution to the problem. Once any ant has
finished its execution, the ant goes back through the followed path and it deposits,
in the environment, pheromones that contains information about the built solution.
These pheromones will influence the decision of future ants, so there is an indirect
communication through the environment called stigmergy.
When an ACO algorithm is applied to any of the optimization problems just described,
the problem is usually modelled into a graph. Nevertheless, the classical graph-based
representation is not the best one for the execution of ACO algorithms because it
presents some important pitfalls. The first one is related to the polynomial, or even
exponential, growth of the resulting graph. The second pitfall is related to those
problems that needs from real variables because these problems cannot be modelled
using the classical graph-based representation.
On the other hand, Evolutionary Computation (EC) are a set of population-based
algorithms based in the Darwinian evolutionary process. In this kind of algorithms
there is one (or more) population composed by different individuals that represent a
possible solution to the problem. For each iteration, the population evolves by the use
of evolutionary procedures which means that better individuals (i.e. better solutions)
are generated along the execution of the algorithm. Both kind of algorithms, EC
and SI, have been traditionally applied in previous NP-hard problems. Different
population-based strategies have been developed, compared and even combined to
design hybrid algorithms.
This thesis has been focused on the analysis of classical graph-based representations
and its application in ACO algorithms into complex problems, and the development of
a new ACO model that tries to take a step forward in this kind of algorithms. In this
new model, the problem is represented using a reduced graph that affects to the ants
behaviour, which becomes more complex. Also, this size reduction generates a fast
growth in the number of pheromones created. For this reason, a new metaheuristic
(called Oblivion Rate) has been designed to control the number of pheromones stored
in the graph.
In this thesis different metaheuristics have been designed for the proposed system
and their performance have been compared. One of these metaheuristics is the
Oblivion Rate, based on an exponential function that takes into account the number
of pheromones created in the system. Other Oblivion Rate function is based on a bioinspired
swarm algorithm that uses some concepts extracted from the evolutionary
algorithms. This bio-inspired swarm algorithm is called Coral Reef Opmization (CRO)
algorithm and it is based on the behaviour of the corals in a reef.
Finally, to test and validate the proposed model, different domains have been used
such as the N-Queens Problem, the Resource-Constraint Project Scheduling Problem,
the Path Finding problem in Video Games, or the Behavioural Pattern Identification
in users. In some of these domains, the performance of the proposed model has been
compared against a classical Genetic Algorithm to provide a comparative study and
perform an analytical comparison between both approaches.En la actualidad, existen un gran número de problemas que debido a su complejidad
necesitan algoritmos basados en heurísticas para la búsqueda de solucionas subóptimas
(o incluso óptimas). Normalmente, estos problemas presentan una complejidad
NP-completa, por lo que los algoritmos clásicos de búsqueda de soluciones no son
apropiados ya que necesitan una gran cantidad de recursos computacionales, o simplemente,
no son capaces de encontrar alguna solución cuando el problema crece. Ejemplos
clásicos de este tipo de problemas son el problema del vendedor viajero (o TSP
del inglés Travelling Salesman Problem) o el problema de las N-reinas. También se
pueden encontrar ejemplos en dominios reales o industriales que generalmente están
ligados a temas de optimización de sistemas complejos, como pueden ser problemas de
planificación, scheduling, problemas de enrutamiento de vehículos (o VRP del inglés
Vehicle Routing Problem), el diseño de redes Wifi abiertas (o WiFiDP del inglés WiFi
network Design Problem), o la identificación de patrones de comportamiento, entre
otros.
En lo referente a los algoritmos basados en heuristicas, dos paradigmas muy
conocidos son los algoritmos de enjambre (Swarm Intelligence) y la computación
evolutiva (Evolutionary Computation). Ambos paradigmas pertencen al subárea de la
Inteligencia Artificial denominada Inteligencia Computacional, que además contiene
los sistemas difusos, redes neuronales y sistemas inmunológicos artificiales.
Los algoritmos de inteligencia de enjambre, o Swarm Intelligence, se centran en
el comportamiento colectivo de sistemas auto-organizativos. Estos algoritmos se
caracterizan por la generación de inteligencia colectiva a partir del comportamiento,
no muy complejo, de los individuos y los esquemas de comunicación entre ellos.
Algunos ejemplos son particle swarm optimization, ant colony optimization (ACO),
bee colony optimization o bird flocking.
Los algoritmos de colonias de hormigas (o ACO del inglés Ant Colony Optimization)
se basan en el comportamiento de estos insectos en el proceso de recolección de
comida. En este tipo de algoritmos, las hormigas van tomando decisiones a lo largo
de la simulación que les permiten construir su propia solución al problema. Una
vez que una hormiga termina su ejecución, deshace el camino andado depositando en
el entorno feronomas que contienen información sobre la solución construida. Estas
feromonas influirán en las decisiones de futuras hormigas, por lo que produce una
comunicación indirecta utilizando el entorno. A este proceso se le llama estigmergia.
Cuando un algoritmo de hormigas se aplica a alguno de los problemas de optimización
descritos anteriormente, se suele modelar el problema como un grafo sobre el cual
se ejecutarán las hormigas. Sin embargo, la representación basada en grafos
clásica no parece ser la mejor para la ejecución de algoritmos de hormigas porque
presenta algunos problemas importantes. El primer problema está relacionado con
el crecimiento polinómico, o incluso expnomencial, del grafo resultante. El segundo
problema tiene que ver con los problemas que necesitan de variables reales, o de coma
flotante, porque estos problemas, con la representación tradicional basada en grafos,
no pueden ser modelados.
Por otro lado, los algoritmos evolutivos (o EC del inglés Evolutionary Computation)
son un tipo de algoritmos basados en población que están inspirados en el
proceso evolutivo propuesto por Darwin. En este tipo de algoritmos, hay una, o
varias, poblaciones compuestas por individuos diferentes que representan problems
solutiones al problema modelado. Por cada iteración, la población evoluciona mediante
el uso de procedimientos evolutivos, lo que significa que mejores individuos (mejores
soluciones) son creados a lo largo de la ejecución del algoritmo. Ambos tipos de
algorithmos, EC y SI, han sido tradicionalmente aplicados a los problemas NPcompletos
descritos anteriormente. Diferentes estrategias basadas en población han
sido desarrolladas, comparadas e incluso combinadas para el diseño de algoritmos
híbridos.
Esta tesis se ha centrado en el análisis de los modelos clásicos de representación
basada en grafos de problemas complejos para la posterior ejecución de algoritmos
de colonias de hormigas y el desarrollo de un nuevo modelo de hormigas que pretende
suponer un avance en este tipo de algoritmos. En este nuevo modelo, los problemas
son representados en un grafo más compacto que afecta al comportamiento de las
hormigas, el cual se vuelve más complejo. Además, esta reducción en el tamaño
del grafo genera un rápido crecimiento en el número de feronomas creadas. Por
esta razón, una nueva metaheurística (llamada Oblivion Rate) ha sido diseñada para
controlar el número de feromonas almacenadas en el grafo.
En esta tesis, varias metaheuristicas han sido diseñadas para el sistema propuesto y
sus rendimientos han sido comparados. Una de estas metaheurísticas es la Oblivion
Rate basada en una función exponencial que tiene en cuenta el número de feromonas
creadas en el sistema. Otra Oblivion Rate está basada en un algoritmo de enjambre
bio-inspirado que usa algunos conceptos extraídos de la computación evolutiva. Este
algoritmo de enjambre bio-inspirado se llama Optimización de arrecifes de corales (o
CRO del inglés Coral Reef Optimization) y está basado en el comportamiento de los
corales en el arrecife.
Finalmente, para validar y testear el modelo propuesto, se han utilizado diversos
dominios de aplicación como son el problema de las N-reinas, problemas de
planificación de proyectos con restricciones de recursos, problemas de búsqueda de
caminos en entornos de videojuegos y la identificación de patrones de comportamiento
de usuarios. En algunos de estos dominios, el rendimiento del modelo propuesto
ha sido comparado contra un algoritmo genético clásico para realizar un estudio
comparativo, y analítico, entre ambos enfoques
Comparative study of pheromone control heuristics in ACO algorithms for solving RCPSP problems
Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) belong to a kind of traditional NP-hard problems with a high impact on both research and industrial domains. The goal of these problems is to find a feasible assignment for a group of variables where a set of imposed restrictions is satisfied. This family of NP-hard problems demands a huge amount of computational resources even for their simplest cases. For this reason, different heuristic methods have been studied so far in order to discover feasible solutions at an affordable complexity level. This paper elaborates on the application of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms with a novel CSP-graph based model to solve Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problems (RCPSP). The main drawback of this ACO-based model is related to the high number of pheromones created in the system. To overcome this issue we propose two adaptive Oblivion Rate heuristics to control the number of pheromones: the first one, called Dynamic Oblivion Rate, takes into account the overall number of pheromones produced in the system, whereas the second one inspires from the recently contributed Coral Reef Optimization (CRO) solver. A thorough experimental analysis has been carried out using the public PSPLIB library, and the obtained results have been compared to those of the most relevant contributions from the related literature. The performed experiments reveal that the Oblivion Rate heuristic removes at least 79% of the pheromones in the system, whereas the ACO algorithm renders statistically better results than other algorithmic counterparts from the literature
New Swarm-Based Metaheuristics for Resource Allocation and Schwduling Problems
Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática. Fecha de lectura : 10-07-2017Esta tesis tiene embargado el acceso al texto completo hasta el 10-01-201
Tour recommendation for groups
Consider a group of people who are visiting a major touristic city, such as NY, Paris, or Rome. It is reasonable to assume that each member of the group has his or her own interests or preferences about places to visit, which in general may differ from those of other members. Still, people almost always want to hang out together and so the following question naturally arises: What is the best tour that the group could perform together in the city? This problem underpins several challenges, ranging from understanding people’s expected attitudes towards potential points of interest, to modeling and providing good and viable solutions. Formulating this problem is challenging because of multiple competing objectives. For example, making the entire group as happy as possible in general conflicts with the objective that no member becomes disappointed. In this paper, we address the algorithmic implications of the above problem, by providing various formulations that take into account the overall group as well as the individual satisfaction and the length of the tour. We then study the computational complexity of these formulations, we provide effective and efficient practical algorithms, and, finally, we evaluate them on datasets constructed from real city data
An Empirical Study on Collective Intelligence Algorithms for Video Games Problem-Solving
Computational intelligence (CI), such as evolutionary computation or swarm intelligence methods, is a set of bio-inspired algorithms that have been widely used to solve problems in areas like planning, scheduling or constraint satisfaction problems. Constrained satisfaction problems (CSP) have taken an important attention from the research community due to their applicability to real problems. Any CSP problem is usually modelled as a constrained graph where the edges represent a set of restrictions that must be verified by the variables (represented as nodes in the graph) which will define the solution of the problem. This paper studies the performance of two particular CI algorithms, ant colony optimization (ACO) and genetic algorithms (GA), when dealing with graph-constrained models in video games problems. As an application domain, the "Lemmings" video game has been selected, where a set of lemmings must reach the exit point of each level. In order to do that, each level is represented as a graph where the edges store the allowed movements inside the world. The goal of the algorithms is to assign the best skills in each position on a particular level, to guide the lemmings to reach the exit. The paper describes how the ACO and GA algorithms have been modelled and applied to the selected video game. Finally, a complete experimental comparison between both algorithms, based on the number of solutions found and the levels solved, is analysed to study the behaviour of those algorithms in the proposed domain
Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window Constrain using KMeans Clustering to Obtain the Closest Customer
In this paper, the problem statement is solving the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) with Time Window constraint using the Ant Colony Algorithm with K-Means Clustering. In this problem, the vehicles must start at a common depot, pickup from various ware houses, deliver to the respective nodes within the time window provided by the customer and returns to depot. The objectives defined are to reduction in usage of number of vehicles, the total logistics cost and to reduce carbon emissions. The mathematical model described in this paper has considered multiple pickup and multiple delivery points. The proposed solution of this paper aims to provide better and more efficient solution while minimizing areas of conflict so as to provide the best output on a large scale in Vehicle Routing Problem, K-Means Clustering, Time Window constraint, Ant Colony Algorithm
The Use of Persistent Explorer Artificial Ants to Solve the Car Sequencing Problem
Ant Colony Optimisation is a widely researched meta-heuristic which uses the behaviour and pheromone laying activities of foraging ants to find paths through graphs. Since the early 1990’s this approach has been applied to problems such as the Travelling Salesman Problem, Quadratic Assignment Problem and Car Sequencing Problem to name a few. The ACO is not without its problems it tends to find good local optima and not good global optima. To solve this problem modifications have been made to the original ACO such as the Max Min ant system. Other solutions involve combining it with Evolutionary Algorithms to improve results. These improvements focused on the pheromone structures. Inspired by other swarm intelligence algorithms this work attempts to develop a new type of ant to explore different problem paths and thus improve the algorithm. The exploring ant would persist throughout the running time of the algorithm and explore unused paths. The Car Sequencing problem was chosen as a method to test the Exploring Ants. An existing algorithm was modified to implement the explorers. The results show that for the car sequencing problem the exploring ants did not have any positive impact, as the paths they chose were always sub-optimal
A Multi-Objective Mission Planning Method for AUV Target Search
How an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) performs fully automated task allocation
and achieves satisfactory mission planning effects during the search for potential threats deployed
in an underwater space is the focus of the paper. First, the task assignment problem is defined
as a traveling salesman problem (TSP) with specific and distinct starting and ending points. Two
competitive and non-commensurable optimization goals, the total sailing distance and the turning
angle generated by an AUV to completely traverse threat points in the planned order, are taken into
account. The maneuverability limitations of an AUV, namely, minimum radius of a turn and speed,
are also introduced as constraints. Then, an improved ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm
based on fuzzy logic and a dynamic pheromone volatilization rule is developed to solve the TSP.
With the help of the fuzzy set, the ants that have moved along better paths are screened and the
pheromone update is performed only on preferred paths so as to enhance pathfinding guidance in the
early stage of the ACO algorithm. By using the dynamic pheromone volatilization rule, more volatile
pheromones on preferred paths are produced as the number of iterations of the ACO algorithm
increases, thus providing an effective way for the algorithm to escape from a local minimum in
the later stage. Finally, comparative simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and
advantages of the proposed algorithm and the influence of critical parameters is also analyzed
and demonstrated.National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) 52101347Foundations for young scientists' cultivation 7900000
Emergency medical supplies scheduling during public health emergencies: algorithm design based on AI techniques
Based on AI technology, this study proposes a novel large-scale emergency medical supplies scheduling (EMSS) algorithm to address the issues of low turnover efficiency of medical supplies and unbalanced supply and demand point scheduling in public health emergencies. We construct a fairness index using an improved Gini coefficient by considering the demand for emergency medical supplies (EMS), actual distribution, and the degree of emergency at disaster sites. We developed a bi-objective optimisation model with a minimum Gini index and scheduling time. We employ a heterogeneous ant colony algorithm to solve the Pareto boundary based on reinforcement learning. A reinforcement learning mechanism is introduced to update and exchange pheromones among populations, with reward factors set to adjust pheromones and improve algorithm convergence speed. The effectiveness of the algorithm for a large EMSS problem is verified by comparing its comprehensive performance against a super-large capacity evaluation index. Results demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness in reducing convergence time and facilitating escape from local optima in EMSS problems. The algorithm addresses the issue of demand differences at each disaster point affecting fair distribution. This study optimises early-stage EMSS schemes for public health events to minimise losses and casualties while mitigating emotional distress among disaster victims
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