A Method to Change Phase Transition Nature -- Toward Annealing Method --

In this paper, we review a way to change nature of phase transition with annealing methods in mind. Annealing methods are regarded as a general technique to solve optimization problems efficiently. In annealing methods, we introduce a controllable parameter which represents a kind of fluctuation and decrease the parameter gradually. Annealing methods face with a difficulty when a phase transition point exists during the protocol. Then, it is important to develop a method to avoid the phase transition by introducing a new type of fluctuation. By taking the Potts model for instance, we review a way to change the phase transition nature. Although the method described in this paper does not succeed to avoid the phase transition, we believe that the concept of the method will be useful for optimization problems.Comment: 27 pages, 3 figures, revised version will appear in proceedings of Kinki University Quantum Computing Series Vo.

Investigation of the effect of feeding period in honey bee algorithm

In the study, it was investigated the ejaculation ability and semen quality of drones, according to feeding with pollen in different periods. In the first step of the study, 16 %, 32 %, 47 %, 63 %, 79 %, and 100 % feeding periods were applied to the drones, for investigating the effect on ejaculation ability, and the semen quality of drones was investigated. While investigating these feeding period effects “0-1”, bonded, and unbounded knapsack optimization problems were used. After the most effective feeding period was determined, this period was applied to the traveling salesman and liquid storage tank problems in the second step of the study. In the analysis of the traveling salesman problem, it was determined the shortest way between two cities. Analysis of the liquid storage tank problem, it was determined the minimum connector areas. As a result, the analysis results showed that the performance of the artificial bee colony algorithm is very good while solving too complex engineering optimization problems

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

Exact and heuristic approaches for multi-component optimisation problems

Modern real world applications are commonly complex, consisting of multiple subsystems that may interact with or depend on each other. Our case-study about wave energy converters (WEC) for the renewable energy industry shows that in such a multi-component system, optimising each individual component cannot yield global optimality for the entire system, owing to the influence of their interactions or the dependence on one another. Moreover, modelling a multi-component problem is rarely easy due to the complexity of the issues, which leads to a desire for existent models on which to base, and against which to test, calculations. Recently, the travelling thief problem (TTP) has attracted significant attention in the Evolutionary Computation community. It is intended to offer a better model for multicomponent systems, where researchers can push forward their understanding of the optimisation of such systems, especially for understanding of the interconnections between the components. The TTP interconnects with two classic NP-hard problems, namely the travelling salesman problem and the 0-1 knapsack problem, via the transportation cost that non-linearly depends on the accumulated weight of items. This non-linear setting introduces additional complexity. We study this nonlinearity through a simplified version of the TTP - the packing while travelling (PWT) problem, which aims to maximise the total reward for a given travelling tour. Our theoretical and experimental investigations demonstrate that the difficulty of a given problem instance is significantly influenced by adjusting a single parameter, the renting rate, which prompted our method of creating relatively hard instances using simple evolutionary algorithms. Our further investigations into the PWT problem yield a dynamic programming (DP) approach that can solve the problem in pseudo polynomial time and a corresponding approximation scheme. The experimental investigations show that the new approaches outperform the state-of-the-art ones. We furthermore propose three exact algorithms for the TTP, based on the DP of the PWT problem. By employing the exact DP for the underlying PWT problem as a subroutine, we create a novel indicator-based hybrid evolutionary approach for a new bi-criteria formulation of the TTP. This hybrid design takes advantage of the DP approach, along with a number of novel indicators and selection mechanisms to achieve better solutions. The results of computational experiments show that the approach is capable to outperform the state-of-the-art results.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 201