Deep Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Parameter Control in Differential Evolution for Multi-Objective Optimization

Evolutionary algorithms (EA) are efficient population-based stochastic algorithms for solving optimization problems. The performance of EAs largely depends on the configuration of values of parameters that control their search. Previous works studied how to configure EAs, though, there is a lack of a general approach to effectively tune EAs. To fill this gap, this paper presents a consistent, automated approach for tuning and controlling parameterized search of an EA. For this, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based approach called ‘DRL-APC-DE’ for online controlling search parameter values for a multi-objective Differential Evolution algorithm. The proposed method is trained and evaluated on widely adopted multi-objective test problems. The experimental results show that the proposed approach performs competitively to a non-adaptive Differential Evolution algorithm, tuned by grid search on the same range of possible parameter values. Subsequently, the trained algorithms have been applied to unseen multi-objective problems for the adaptive control of parameters. Results show the successful ability of DRL-APC-DE to control parameters for solving these problems, which has the potential to significantly reduce the dependency on parameter tuning for the successful application of EAs

Service Performance Pattern Analysis and Prediction of Commercially Available Cloud Providers

The knowledge of service performance of cloud providers is essential for cloud service users to choose the cloud services that meet their requirements. Instantaneous performance readings are accessible, but prolonged observations provide more reliable information. However, due to technical complexities and costs of monitoring services, it may not be possible to access the service performance of cloud provider for longer time durations. The extended observation periods are also a necessity for prediction of future behavior of services. These predictions have very high value for decision making both for private and corporate cloud users, as the uncertainty about the future performance of purchased cloud services is an important risk factor. Predictions can be used by specialized entities, such as cloud service brokers (CSBs) to optimally recommend cloud services to the cloud users. In this paper, we address the challenge of prediction. To achieve this, the current service performance patterns of cloud providers are analyzed and future performance of cloud providers are predicted using to the observed service performance data. It is done using two automatic predicting approaches: ARIMA and ETS. Error measures of entire service performance prediction of cloud providers are evaluated against the actual performance of the cloud providers computed over a period of one month. Results obtained in the performance prediction show that the methodology is applicable for both short- term and long-term performance prediction

Comparisons of Heat Map and IFL Technique to Evaluate the Performance of Commercially Available Cloud Providers

Cloud service providers (CSPs) offer different Ser- vice Level Agreements (SLAs) to the cloud users. Cloud Service Brokers (CSBs) provide multiple sets of alternatives to the cloud users according to users requirements. Generally, a CSB considers the service commitments of CSPs rather than the actual quality of CSPs services. To overcome this issue, the broker should verify the service performances while recommending cloud services to the cloud users, using all available data. In this paper, we compare our two approaches to do so: a min-max-min decomposition based on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Logic (IFL) and a Performance Heat Map technique, to evaluate the performance of commercially available cloud providers. While the IFL technique provides simple, total order of the evaluated CSPs, Performance Heat Map provides transparent and explanatory, yet consistent evaluation of service performance of commercially available CSPs. The identified drawbacks of the IFL technique are: 1) It does not return the accurate performance evaluation over multiple decision alternatives due to highly influenced by critical feedback of the evaluators; 2) Overall ranking of the CSPs is not as expected according to the performance measurement. As a result, we recommend to use performance Heat Map for this problem

Computer Intensive Physics

In the abstract packet for the conference is an article of references about ideas from cognitive studies that help us teach physics (Fuller, 1998). There is also a pamphlet of references to innovative physics teaching programs in the United States and many of those programs have world-wide web sites so you can access information about those programs from Portugal (O\u27Kuma, 1998). I want to talk about my research project last year, which I now call Computer Intensive Physics , but it really started out as paper-less physics