TOWARDS A UNIFIED VIEW OF METAHEURISTICS

This talk provides a complete background on metaheuristics and presents in a unified view the main design questions for all families of metaheuristics and clearly illustrates how to implement the algorithms under a software framework to reuse both the design and code. The key search components of metaheuristics are considered as a toolbox for: - Designing efficient metaheuristics (e.g. local search, tabu search, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm optimization, scatter search, ant colonies, bee colonies, artificial immune systems) for optimization problems. - Designing efficient metaheuristics for multi-objective optimization problems. - Designing hybrid, parallel and distributed metaheuristics. - Implementing metaheuristics on sequential and parallel machines

TOWARDS A UNIFIED VIEW OF METAHEURISTICS

This talk provides a complete background on metaheuristics and presents in a unified view the main design questions for all families of metaheuristics and clearly illustrates how to implement the algorithms under a software framework to reuse both the design and code. The key search components of metaheuristics are considered as a toolbox for: - Designing efficient metaheuristics (e.g. local search, tabu search, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm optimization, scatter search, ant colonies, bee colonies, artificial immune systems) for optimization problems. - Designing efficient metaheuristics for multi-objective optimization problems. - Designing hybrid, parallel and distributed metaheuristics. - Implementing metaheuristics on sequential and parallel machines

ParaDisEO-Based Design of Parallel and Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comInternational audienceParaDisEO is a framework dedicated to the design of parallel and distributed metaheuristics including local search methods and evolutionary algorithms. This paper focuses on the latter aspect. We present the three parallel and distributed models implemented in ParaDisEO and show how these can be exploited in a user-friendly, flexible and transparent way. These models can be deployed on distributed memory machines as well as on shared memory multi-processors, taking advantage of the shared memory in the latter case. In addition, we illustrate the instantiation of the models through two applications demonstrating the efficiency and robustness of the framework

Parallel ACO with a Ring Neighborhood for Dynamic TSP

The current paper introduces a new parallel computing technique based on ant colony optimization for a dynamic routing problem. In the dynamic traveling salesman problem the distances between cities as travel times are no longer fixed. The new technique uses a parallel model for a problem variant that allows a slight movement of nodes within their Neighborhoods. The algorithm is tested with success on several large data sets.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure; accepted J. Information Technology Researc

Multi-Objective Big Data Optimization with jMetal and Spark

Big Data Optimization is the term used to refer to optimization problems which have to manage very large amounts of data. In this paper, we focus on the parallelization of metaheuristics with the Apache Spark cluster computing system for solving multi-objective Big Data Optimization problems. Our purpose is to study the influence of accessing data stored in the Hadoop File System (HDFS) in each evaluation step of a metaheuristic and to provide a software tool to solve these kinds of problems. This tool combines the jMetal multi-objective optimization framework with Apache Spark. We have carried out experiments to measure the performance of the proposed parallel infrastructure in an environment based on virtual machines in a local cluster comprising up to 100 cores. We obtained interesting results for computational e ort and propose guidelines to face multi-objective Big Data Optimization problems.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Bandit-based Variable Fixing for Binary Optimization on GPU Parallel Computing

31st Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP), 01-03 March 2023, Naples, Italy.This paper explores whether reinforcement learning is capable of enhancing metaheuristics for the quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO), which have recently attracted attention as a solver for a wide range of combinatorial optimization problems. In particular, we introduce a novel approach called the bandit-based variable fixing (BVF). The key idea behind BVF is to regard an execution of an arbitrary metaheuristic with a variable fixed as a play of a slot machine. Thus, BVF explores variables to fix with the maximum expected reward, and executes a metaheuristic at the same time. The bandit-based approach is then extended to fix multiple variables. To accelerate solving multi-armed bandit problem, we implement a parallel algorithm for BVF on a GPU. Our results suggest that our proposed BVF enhances original metaheuristics

Parallel Hybrid Trajectory Based Metaheuristics for Real-World Problems

G. Luque, E. Alba, Parallel Hybrid Trajectory Based Metaheuristics for Real-World Problems, In Proceedings of Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems, pp. 184-191, 2-4 September, 2015, Taipei, Taiwan, IEEE PressThis paper proposes a novel algorithm combining path relinking with a set of cooperating trajectory based parallel algorithms to yield a new metaheuristic of enhanced search features. Algorithms based on the exploration of the neighborhood of a single solution, like simulated annealing (SA), have offered accurate results for a large number of real-world problems in the past. Because of their trajectory based nature, some advanced models such as the cooperative one are competitive in academic problems, but still show many limitations in addressing large scale instances. In addition, the field of parallel models for trajectory methods has not deeply been studied yet (at least in comparison with parallel population based models). In this work, we propose a new hybrid algorithm which improves cooperative single solution techniques by using path relinking, allowing both to reduce the global execution time and to improve the efficacy of the method. We applied here this new model using a large benchmark of instances of two real-world NP-hard problems: DNA fragment assembly and QAP problems, with competitive results.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech