9 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Formulation space search for two-dimensional packing problems
This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The two-dimension packing problem is concerned with the arrangement of items without overlaps inside a container. In particular we have considered the case when the items are circular objects, some of the general examples that can be found in the industry are related with packing, storing and transportation of circular objects. Although there are several approaches we want to investigate the use of formulation space search. Formulation space search is a fairly recent method that provides an easy way to escape from local optima for non-linear problems allowing to achieve better results. Despite the fact that it has been implemented to solve the packing problem with identical circles, we present an improved implementation of the formulation space search that gives better results for the case of identical and non-identical circles, also considering that they are packed inside different shaped containers, for which we provide the needed modifications for an appropriate implementation. The containers considered are: the unit circle, the unit square, two rectangles with different dimension (length 5, width 1 and length 10 width 1), a right-isosceles triangle, a semicircle and a right-circular quadrant. Results from the tests conducted shown several improvements over the best previously known for the case of identical circles inside three different containers: a right-isosceles triangle, a semicircle and a circular quadrant. In order to extend the scope of the formulation space search approach we used it to solve mixed-integer non-linear problems, in particular those with zero-one variables. Our findings suggest that our implementation provides a competitive way to solve these kind of problems.This study was funded by the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology
(CONACyT)
Construction of Optimal Tubular Networks in Arbitrary Regions in R^3
In this thesis, we describe various algorithms for the construction of tubular networks in an arbitrary three-dimensional region that possesses a principal direction along which the cross-section varies. The region can be digitized into a series of blocks B_i, each of which exhibits no variation in the principle direction. Tubular networks with one inlet and one outlet are constructed by connecting the series of blocks packed with parallel cylindrical tubes.
Packing tubes into a block B_i can be simplified to packing circles into its cross section C_i which is approximated by a polygon. A set of novel circle-packing algorithms are developed to possess the following desirable features. Firstly, circles are first packed into an interior region which is common to several or all blocks and the remainder of the unpacked region are packed afterwards. Secondly, larger circles are placed primarily in the central part of the region. Lastly, at a certain stage of circle-packing, all the packed circles are moved towards the center of mass by a fictitious force so that as much as possible empty space is left along the boundary.
Three fundamental connections are used to construct a tubular network with one inlet and one outlet: (i) endcap connection--two 90-degree bends that connect two adjacent tubes at their ends, (ii) a “merge” operation in which a tube flows into an adjacent tube, and (iii) a “shift” operation in which a tube is shifted into an adjacent position. Tubes at the extreme ends of a network must be connected by endcaps and the other tubes could be connected via any one of the above connections. A set of algorithms are developed to generate all the possible solutions of constructing tubular networks and to check the feasibility of solutions to make sure there is no “dead end” or “isolated loop”.
Among all the feasible networks, an optimal network should be chosen with respect to a certain measure. Obviously, enumerating all the possible solutions of constructing feasible networks is extremely time-consuming and sometimes it can take millions of years. Therefore, genetic algorithm with only mutation is applied here to randomly search for the best network. In this genetic algorithm, every fundamental connection could mutate to any other fundamental connection. Thus every network could mutate to any other one and genetic algorithm could find the globally best network
Efficiently packing unequal disks in a circle: a computational approach which exploits the continuous and combinatorial structure of the problem
none3A. ADDIS; M. LOCATELLI; F. SCHOENAddis, Bernardetta; M., Locatelli; F., Schoe