2,417 research outputs found
A Survey on Load Balancing Algorithms for VM Placement in Cloud Computing
The emergence of cloud computing based on virtualization technologies brings
huge opportunities to host virtual resource at low cost without the need of
owning any infrastructure. Virtualization technologies enable users to acquire,
configure and be charged on pay-per-use basis. However, Cloud data centers
mostly comprise heterogeneous commodity servers hosting multiple virtual
machines (VMs) with potential various specifications and fluctuating resource
usages, which may cause imbalanced resource utilization within servers that may
lead to performance degradation and service level agreements (SLAs) violations.
To achieve efficient scheduling, these challenges should be addressed and
solved by using load balancing strategies, which have been proved to be NP-hard
problem. From multiple perspectives, this work identifies the challenges and
analyzes existing algorithms for allocating VMs to PMs in infrastructure
Clouds, especially focuses on load balancing. A detailed classification
targeting load balancing algorithms for VM placement in cloud data centers is
investigated and the surveyed algorithms are classified according to the
classification. The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive and
comparative understanding of existing literature and aid researchers by
providing an insight for potential future enhancements.Comment: 22 Pages, 4 Figures, 4 Tables, in pres
Planning and Scheduling Transportation Vehicle Fleet in a Congested Traffic Environment
Transportation is a main component of supply chain competitiveness since it plays a major role in the inbound, inter-facility, and outbound logistics. In this context, assigning and scheduling vehicle routing is a crucial management problem. Despite numerous publications dealing with efficient scheduling methods for vehicle routing, very few addressed the inherent stochastic nature of travel times in this problem. In this paper, a vehicle routing problem with time windows and stochastic travel times due to potential traffic congestion is considered. The approach developed introduces mainly the traffic congestion component based on queueing theory. This is an innovative modeling scheme to capture the stochastic behavior of travel times. A case study is used both to illustrate the appropriateness of the approach as well as to show that time-independent solutions are often unrealistic within a congested traffic environment which is often the case on the european road networkstransportation; vehicle fleet; planning; scheduling; congested traffic
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Combinatorial optimization and metaheuristics
Today, combinatorial optimization is one of the youngest and most active areas of discrete mathematics. It is a branch of optimization in applied mathematics and computer science, related to operational research, algorithm theory and computational complexity theory. It sits at the intersection of several fields, including artificial intelligence, mathematics and software engineering. Its increasing interest arises for the fact that a large number of scientific and industrial problems can be formulated as abstract combinatorial optimization problems, through graphs and/or (integer) linear programs. Some of these problems have polynomial-time (“efficient”) algorithms, while most of them are NP-hard, i.e. it is not proved that they can be solved in polynomial-time. Mainly, it means that it is not possible to guarantee that an exact solution to the problem can be found and one has to settle for an approximate solution with known performance guarantees. Indeed, the goal of approximate methods is to find “quickly” (reasonable run-times), with “high” probability, provable “good” solutions (low error from the real optimal solution). In the last 20 years, a new kind of algorithm commonly called metaheuristics have emerged in this class, which basically try to combine heuristics in high level frameworks aimed at efficiently and effectively exploring the search space. This report briefly outlines the components, concepts, advantages and disadvantages of different metaheuristic approaches from a conceptual point of view, in order to analyze their similarities and differences. The two very significant forces of intensification and diversification, that mainly determine the behavior of a metaheuristic, will be pointed out. The report concludes by exploring the importance of hybridization and integration methods
On green routing and scheduling problem
The vehicle routing and scheduling problem has been studied with much
interest within the last four decades. In this paper, some of the existing
literature dealing with routing and scheduling problems with environmental
issues is reviewed, and a description is provided of the problems that have
been investigated and how they are treated using combinatorial optimization
tools
Preface: Swarm Intelligence, Focus on Ant and Particle Swarm Optimization
In the era globalisation the emerging technologies are governing engineering industries to a multifaceted state. The escalating complexity has demanded researchers to find the possible ways of easing the solution of the problems. This has motivated the researchers to grasp ideas from the nature and implant it in the engineering sciences. This way of thinking led to emergence of many biologically inspired algorithms that have proven to be efficient in handling the computationally complex problems with competence such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), etc. Motivated by the capability of the biologically inspired algorithms the present book on ""Swarm Intelligence: Focus on Ant and Particle Swarm Optimization"" aims to present recent developments and applications concerning optimization with swarm intelligence techniques. The papers selected for this book comprise a cross-section of topics that reflect a variety of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds. In addition to the introduction of new concepts of swarm intelligence, this book also presented some selected representative case studies covering power plant maintenance scheduling; geotechnical engineering; design and machining tolerances; layout problems; manufacturing process plan; job-shop scheduling; structural design; environmental dispatching problems; wireless communication; water distribution systems; multi-plant supply chain; fault diagnosis of airplane engines; and process scheduling. I believe these 27 chapters presented in this book adequately reflect these topics
Waste Collection Vehicle Routing Problem: Literature Review
Waste generation is an issue which has caused wide public concern in modern societies, not only for the quantitative rise of the amount of waste generated, but also for the increasing complexity of some products and components. Waste collection is a highly relevant activity in the reverse logistics system and how to collect waste in an efficient way is an area that needs to be improved. This paper analyzes the major contribution about Waste Collection Vehicle Routing Problem (WCVRP) in literature. Based on a classification of waste collection (residential, commercial and industrial), firstly the key findings for these three types of waste collection are presented. Therefore, according to the model (Node Routing Problems and Arc Routing problems) used to represent WCVRP, different methods and techniques are analyzed in this paper to solve WCVRP. This paper attempts to serve as a roadmap of research literature produced in the field of WCVRP
Hybrid Meta-heuristic Algorithms for Static and Dynamic Job Scheduling in Grid Computing
The term ’grid computing’ is used to describe an infrastructure that connects geographically
distributed computers and heterogeneous platforms owned by multiple organizations
allowing their computational power, storage capabilities and other resources to be selected
and shared. Allocating jobs to computational grid resources in an efficient manner is one
of the main challenges facing any grid computing system; this allocation is called job
scheduling in grid computing. This thesis studies the application of hybrid meta-heuristics
to the job scheduling problem in grid computing, which is recognized as being one of
the most important and challenging issues in grid computing environments. Similar to
job scheduling in traditional computing systems, this allocation is known to be an NPhard
problem. Meta-heuristic approaches such as the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Variable
Neighbourhood Search (VNS) and Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) have all proven their
effectiveness in solving different scheduling problems. However, hybridising two or more
meta-heuristics shows better performance than applying a stand-alone approach. The new
high level meta-heuristic will inherit the best features of the hybridised algorithms, increasing
the chances of skipping away from local minima, and hence enhancing the overall
performance. In this thesis, the application of VNS for the job scheduling problem in grid
computing is introduced. Four new neighbourhood structures, together with a modified
local search, are proposed. The proposed VNS is hybridised using two meta-heuristic
methods, namely GA and ACO, in loosely and strongly coupled fashions, yielding four
new sequential hybrid meta-heuristic algorithms for the problem of static and dynamic
single-objective independent batch job scheduling in grid computing. For the static version
of the problem, several experiments were carried out to analyse the performance of the
proposed schedulers in terms of minimising the makespan using well known benchmarks.
The experiments show that the proposed schedulers achieved impressive results compared
to other traditional, heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches selected from the bibliography.
To model the dynamic version of the problem, a simple simulator, which uses
the rescheduling technique, is designed and new problem instances are generated, by
using a well-known methodology, to evaluate the performance of the proposed hybrid
schedulers. The experimental results show that the use of rescheduling provides significant
improvements in terms of the makespan compared to other non-rescheduling approaches
Routing design for less-than-truckload motor carriers using ant colony techniques
One of the most important challenges for Less-Than-Truck-Load carriers consists of determining how to consolidate flows of small shipments to minimize costs while maintaining a certain level of service. For any origin-destination pair, there are several strategies to consolidate flows, but the most usual ones are: peddling/collecting routes and shipping through one or more break-bulk terminals. Therefore, the target is determining a route for each origin-destination pair that minimizes the total transportation and handling cost guaranteeing a certain level of service. Exact resolution is not viable for real size problems due to the excessive computational time required. This research studies different aspects of the problem and provides a metaheuristic algorithm (based on Ant Colonies Optimization techniques) capable of solving real problems in a reasonable computational time. The viability of the approach has been proved by means of the application of the algorithm to a real Spanish case, obtaining encouraging results
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