A viral system to optimise the daily drayage problem

The intermodal transport chain can become more efficient by means of a good organisation of the drayage movements. Drayage in intermodal container terminals involves the pick up or delivery of containers at customer locations, and the main objective is normally the assignment of transportation tasks to the different vehicles, often with the presence of time windows. This paper focuses on a new approach to tackle the daily drayage problem by the use of viral system (VS). VS is a novel bio-inspired approach that makes use of a virus-infection biological analogy that is producing very satisfactory results when dealing with complex problems with huge feasibility region.Unión Europea TEC2013-47286-C3-3-

Improved Task Scheduling for Virtual Machines in the Cloud based on the Gravitational Search Algorithm

The rapid and convenient provision of the available computing resources is a crucial requirement in modern cloud computing environments. However, if only the execution time is taken into account when the resources are scheduled, it could lead to imbalanced workloads as well as to significant under-utilisation of the involved Virtual Machines (VMs). In the present work a novel task scheduling scheme is introduced, which is based on the proper adaptation of a modern and quite effective evolutionary optimization method, the Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA). The proposed scheme aims at optimizing the entire scheduling procedure, in terms of both the tasks execution time and the system (VMs) resource utilisation. Moreover, the fitness function was properly selected considering both the above factors in an appropriately weighted function in order to obtain better results for large inputs. Sufficient simulation experiments show the efficiency of the proposed scheme, as well as its excellence over related approaches of the bibliography, with similar objectives.Comment: 8 page

Impact analysis of crossovers in a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

Multi-objective optimization has become mainstream because several real-world problems are naturally posed as a Multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs) in all fields of engineering and science. Usually MOPs consist of more than two conflicting objective functions and that demand trade-off solutions. Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are extremely useful and well-suited for solving MOPs due to population based nature. MOEAs evolve its population of solutions in a natural way and searched for compromise solutions in single simulation run unlike traditional methods. These algorithms make use of various intrinsic search operators in efficient manners. In this paper, we experimentally study the impact of different multiple crossovers in multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) framework and evaluate its performance over test instances of 2009 IEEE congress on evolutionary computation (CEC?09) developed for MOEAs competition. Based on our carried out experiment, we observe that used variation operators are considered to main source to improve the algorithmic performance of MOEA/D for dealing with CEC?09 complicated test problems

Enhanced Version of Multi-algorithm Genetically Adaptive for Multiobjective optimization

Abstract: Multi-objective EAs (MOEAs) are well established population-based techniques for solving various search and optimization problems. MOEAs employ different evolutionary operators to evolve populations of solutions for approximating the set of optimal solutions of the problem at hand in a single simulation run. Different evolutionary operators suite different problems. The use of multiple operators with a self-adaptive capability can further improve the performance of existing MOEAs. This paper suggests an enhanced version of a genetically adaptive multi-algorithm for multi-objective (AMAL-GAM) optimisation which includes differential evolution (DE), particle swarm optimization (PSO), simulated binary crossover (SBX), Pareto archive evolution strategy (PAES) and simplex crossover (SPX) for population evolution during the course of optimization. We examine the performance of this enhanced version of AMALGAM experimentally over two different test suites, the ZDT test problems and the test instances designed recently for the special session on MOEA?s competition at the Congress of Evolutionary Computing of 2009 (CEC?09). The suggested algorithm has found better approximate solutions on most test problems in terms of inverted generational distance (IGD) as the metric indicator. - See more at: http://thesai.org/Publications/ViewPaper?Volume=6&Issue=12&Code=ijacsa&SerialNo=37#sthash.lxkuyzEf.dpu

Hybrid non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm with adaptive operators selection

Multiobjective optimization entails minimizing or maximizing multiple objective functions subject to a set of constraints. Many real world applications can be formulated as multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs), which often involve multiple conflicting objectives to be optimized simultaneously. Recently, a number of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) were developed suggested for these MOPs as they do not require problem specific information. They find a set of non-dominated solutions in a single run. The evolutionary process on which they are based, typically relies on a single genetic operator. Here, we suggest an algorithm which uses a basket of search operators. This is because it is never easy to choose the most suitable operator for a given problem. The novel hybrid non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (HNSGA) introduced here in this paper and tested on the ZDT (Zitzler-Deb-Thiele) and CEC’09 (2009 IEEE Conference on Evolutionary Computations) benchmark problems specifically formulated for MOEAs. Numerical results prove that the proposed algorithm is competitive with state-of-the-art MOEAs

Forecasting currency exchange rate time series with fireworks-algorithm-based higher order neural network with special attention to training data enrichment

Exchange rates are highly fluctuating by nature, thus difficult to forecast. Artificial neural networks (ANN) have proved to be better than statistical methods. Inadequate training data may lead the model to reach suboptimal solution resulting, poor accuracy as ANN-based forecasts are data driven. To enhance forecasting accuracy, we suggests a method of enriching training dataset through exploring and incorporating of virtual data points (VDPs) by an evolutionary method called as fireworks algorithm trained functional link artificial neural network (FWA-FLN). The model maintains the correlation between the current and past data, especially at the oscillation point on the time series. The exploring of a VDP and forecast of the succeeding term go consecutively by the FWA-FLN. Real exchange rate time series are used to train and validate the proposed model. The efficiency of the proposed technique is related to other models trained similarly and produces far better prediction accuracy

THE USE OF DRONES IN MODERN AGRICULTURE

Drones are largely associated with military, industrial and other specialized operations, but with recent developments in sensors and information technology over the past two decades, the scope of drones has been expanded to other areas, such as agriculture. This approach to agricultural management is based on the observation, measurement and measurement of real-time data on crops and animals. It removes the need for assumptions in modern agriculture and instead gives farmers the ability to maximize their yields while increasing crop production. This paper presents a brief summary of drone implementation in agriculture