Nature inspired genetic algorithms for hard packing problems

This paper presents two novel genetic algorithms (GAs) for hard industrially relevant packing problems. The design of both algorithms is inspired by aspects of molecular genetics, in particular, the modular exon-intron structure of eukaryotic genes. Two representative packing problems are used to test the utility of the proposed approach: the bin packing problem (BPP) and the multiple knapsack problem (MKP). The algorithm for the BPP, the exon shuffling GA (ESGA), is a steady-state GA with a sophisticated crossover operator that makes maximum use of the principle of natural selection to evolve feasible solutions with no explicit verification of constraint violations. The second algorithm, the Exonic GA (ExGA), implements an RNA inspired adaptive repair function necessary for the highly constrained MKP. Three different variants of this algorithm are presented and compared, which evolve a partial ordering of items using a segmented encoding that is utilised in the repair of infeasible solutions. All algorithms are tested on a range of benchmark problems, and the results indicate a very high degree of accuracy and reliability compared to other approaches in the literature.     

An empirical investigation of meta-heuristic and heuristic algorithms for a 2D packing problem

In this paper we consider the two-dimensional (2D) rectangular packing problem, where a fixed set of items have to be allocated on a single object. Two heuristics, which belong to the class of packing procedures that preserve bottom-left (BL) stability, are hybridised with three meta-heuristic algorithms (genetic algorithms (GA), simulated annealing (SA), naı̈ve evolution (NE)) and local search heuristic (hill-climbing). This study compares the hybrid algorithms in terms of solution quality and computation time on a number of packing problems of different size. In order to show the effectiveness of the design of the different algorithms, their performance is compared to random search (RS) and heuristic packing routines.     

A note on the minimum bounded edge-partition of a tree

Minimum bounded edge-partition divides the edge set of a tree into the minimum number of disjoint connected components given a maximum weight for any component. It is an adaptation of the uniform edge-partition of a tree. An optimization algorithm is developed for this NP-hard problem, based on repeated bin packing of inter-related instances. The algorithm has linear running time for the class of ‘balanced trees’ common for the stochastic programming application which motivated investigation of this problem.Fast 2-approximation algorithms are formed for general instances by replacing the optimal bin packing with almost any bin packing heuristic. The asymptotic worst-case ratio of these approximation algorithms is never better than the absolute worst-case ratio of the bin packing heuristic used.     

Graph Coloring with Adaptive Evolutionary Algorithms

This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation on solving graph coloring problems with Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs). After testing different algorithm variants we conclude that the best option is an asexual EA using order-based representation and an adaptation mechanism that periodically changes the fitness function during the evolution. This adaptive EA is general, using no domain specific knowledge, except, of course, from the decoder (fitness function). We compare this adaptive EA to a powerful traditional graph coloring technique DSatur and the Grouping Genetic Algorithm (GGA) on a wide range of problem instances with different size, topology and edge density. The results show that the adaptive EA is superior to the Grouping (GA) and outperforms DSatur on the hardest problem instances. Furthermore, it scales up better with the problem size than the other two algorithms and indicates a linear computational complexity.     

A hybrid genetic algorithm-heuristic for a two-dimensional orthogonal packing problem

In this paper we address a two-dimensional (2D) orthogonal packing problem, where a fixed set of small rectangles has to be placed on a larger stock rectangle in such a way that the amount of trim loss is minimized. The algorithm we propose hybridizes a placement procedure with a genetic algorithm based on random keys. The approach is tested on a set of instances taken from the literature and compared with other approaches. The computation results validate the quality of the solutions and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.     

Constraint Handling in Genetic Algorithms: The Set Partitioning Problem

In this paper we present a genetic algorithm-based heuristic for solving the set partitioning problem (SPP). The SPP is an important combinatorial optimisation problem used by many airlines as a mathematical model for flight crew scheduling.A key feature of the SPP is that it is a highly constrained problem, all constraints being equalities. New genetic algorithm (GA) components: separate fitness and unfitness scores, adaptive mutation, matching selection and ranking replacement, are introduced to enable a GA to effectively handle such constraints. These components are generalisable to any GA for constrained problems.We present a steady-state GA in conjunction with a specialised heuristic improvement operator for solving the SPP. The performance of our algorithm is evaluated on a large set of real-world problems. Computational results show that the genetic algorithm-based heuristic is capable of producing high-quality solutions.     

Self-Adaptive Genetic Algorithm for Clustering

Clustering is a hard combinatorial problem which has many applications in science and practice. Genetic algorithms (GAs) have turned out to be very effective in solving the clustering problem. However, GAs have many parameters, the optimal selection of which depends on the problem instance. We introduce a new self-adaptive GA that finds the parameter setup on-line during the execution of the algorithm. In this way, the algorithm is able to find the most suitable combination of the available components. The method is robust and achieves results comparable to or better than a carefully fine-tuned non-adaptive GA.     

Exact algorithms for the two-dimensional strip packing problem with and without rotations

We propose exact algorithms for the two-dimensional strip packing problem (2SP) with and without 90° rotations. We first focus on the perfect packing problem (PP), which is a special case of 2SP, wherein all given rectangles are required to be packed without wasted space, and design branch-and-bound algorithms introducing several branching rules and bounding operations. A combination of these rules yields an algorithm that is especially efficient for feasible instances of PP. We then propose several methods of applying the PP algorithms to 2SP. Our algorithms succeed in efficiently solving benchmark instances of PP with up to 500 rectangles and those of 2SP with up to 200 rectangles. They are often faster than existing exact algorithms specially tailored for problems without rotations.     

The analysis of evolutionary algorithms on sorting and shortest paths problems

The analysis of evolutionary algorithms is up to now limited to special classes of functions and fitness landscapes. E.g., it is not possible to characterize the set of TSP instances (or another NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem) which are solved by a generic evolutionary algorithm (EA) in an expected time bounded by some given polynomial. As a first step from artificial functions to typical problems from combinatorial optimization, we analyze simple EAs on well-known problems, namely sorting and shortest paths. Although it cannot be expected that EAs outperform the well-known problem specific algorithms on these simple problems, it is interesting to analyze how EAs work on these problems. The following results are obtained:– Sorting is the maximization of sortedness which is measured by one of several well-known measures of presortedness. The different measures of presortedness lead to fitness functions of quite different difficulty for EAs.– Shortest paths problems are hard for all types of EA, if they are considered as single-objective optimization problems, whereas they are easy as multi-objective optimization problems.     

Test driving three 1995 genetic algorithms: New test functions and geometric matching

Genetic algorithms have attracted a good deal of interest in the heuristic search community. Yet there are several different types of genetic algorithms with varying performance and search characteristics. In this article we look at three genetic algorithms: an elitist simple genetic algorithm, the CHC algorithm and Genitor. One problem in comparing algorithms is that most test problems in the genetic algorithm literature can be solved using simple local search methods. In this article, the three algorithms are compared using new test problems that are not readily solved using simple local search methods. We then compare a local search method to genetic algorithms for geometric matching and examine a hybrid algorithm that combines local and genetic search. The geometric matching problem matches a model (e.g., a line drawing) to a subset of lines contained in a field of line fragments. Local search is currently the best known method for solving general geometric matching problems.     

Genetic algorithms for solving the discrete ordered median problem

In this paper we present two new heuristic approaches to solve the Discrete Ordered Median Problem (DOMP). Described heuristic methods, named HGA1 and HGA2 are based on a hybrid of genetic algorithms (GA) and a generalization of the well-known Fast Interchange heuristic (GFI). In order to investigate the effect of encoding on GA performance, two different encoding schemes are implemented: binary encoding in HGA1, and integer representation in HGA2. If binary encoding is used (HGA1), new genetic operators that keep the feasibility of individuals are proposed. Integer representation keeps the individuals feasible by default, so HGA2 uses slightly modified standard genetic operators. In both methods, caching GA technique was integrated with the GFI heuristic to improve computational performance. The algorithms are tested on standard ORLIB p-median instances with up to 900 nodes. The obtained results are also compared with the results of existing methods for solving DOMP in order to assess their merits.     

A modified variable neighborhood search for the discrete ordered median problem

This paper presents a modified Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) heuristic algorithm for solving the Discrete Ordered Median Problem (DOMP). This heuristic is based on new neighborhoods’ structures that allow an efficient encoding of the solutions of the DOMP avoiding sorting in the evaluation of the objective function at each considered solution. The algorithm is based on a data structure, computed in preprocessing, that organizes the minimal necessary information to update and evaluate solutions in linear time without sorting. In order to investigate the performance, the new algorithm is compared with other heuristic algorithms previously available in the literature for solving DOMP. We report on some computational experiments based on the well-known N-median instances of the ORLIB with up to 900 nodes. The obtained results are comparable or superior to existing algorithms in the literature, both in running times and number of best solutions found.     

New and improved level heuristics for the rectangular strip packing and variable-sized bin packing problems

We consider two types of orthogonal, oriented, rectangular, two-dimensional packing problems. The first is the strip packing problem, for which four new and improved level-packing algorithms are presented. Two of these algorithms guarantee a packing that may be disentangled by guillotine cuts. These are combined with a two-stage heuristic designed to find a solution to the variable-sized bin packing problem, where the aim is to pack all items into bins so as to minimise the packing area. This heuristic packs the levels of a solution to the strip packing problem into large bins and then attempts to repack the items in those bins into smaller bins in order to reduce wasted space. The results of the algorithms are compared to those of seven level-packing heuristics from the literature by means of a large number of strip-packing benchmark instances. It is found that the new algorithms are an improvement over known level-packing heuristics for the strip packing problem. The advancements made by the new and improved algorithms are limited in terms of utilised space when applied to the variable-sized bin packing problem. However, they do provide results faster than many existing algorithms.     

Resource augmentation in two-dimensional packing with orthogonal rotations

We consider the problem of packing two-dimensional rectangles into the minimum number of unit squares, when 90^° rotations are allowed. Our main contribution is a polynomial-time algorithm for packing rectangles into at most OPT bins whose sides have length (1+ε), for any positive ε. Additionally, we show near-optimal packing results for a number of related packing problems.     

Reducing the bandwidth of a sparse matrix with a genetic algorithm

Abstract

The matrix bandwidth minimization problem (MBMP) consists in finding a permutation of the lines and columns of a given sparse matrix in order to keep the non-zero elements in a band that is as close as possible to the main diagonal. Equivalently in terms of graph theory, MBMP is defined as the problem of finding a labelling of the vertices of a given graph G such that its bandwidth is minimized. In this paper, we propose an improved genetic algorithm (GA)-based heuristic for solving the matrix bandwidth minimization problem, motivated by its robustness and efficiency in a wide area of optimization problems. Extensively computational results are reported for an often used set of benchmark instances. The obtained results on the different instances investigated show improvement of the quality of the solutions and demonstrate the efficiency of our GA compared to the existing methods in the literature.     

A Method for Solving Container Packing for a Single Size of Box

There is an extensive literature on heuristic algorithms for two-dimensional cutting problems and three-dimensional packing, but there seems to be very little on the three-dimensional single-box type packing problem. This paper gives a structure for dealing with that problem as a heuristic. It also presents a set of upper bounds on the optimal fit. Finally, the paper compares a particular application of the algorithmic structure with the George and Robinson multiple-box type heuristic.     

Handling equality constraints in evolutionary optimization

Over the last few decades several methods have been proposed for handling functional constraints while solving optimization problems using evolutionary algorithms (EAs). However, the presence of equality constraints makes the feasible space very small compared to the entire search space. As a consequence, the handling of equality constraints has long been a difficult issue for evolutionary optimization methods. This paper presents a Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm (HEA) for solving optimization problems with both equality and inequality constraints. In HEA, we propose a new local search technique with special emphasis on equality constraints. The basic concept of the new technique is to reach a point on the equality constraint from the current position of an individual solution, and then explore on the constraint landscape. We believe this new concept will influence the future research direction for constrained optimization using population based algorithms. The proposed algorithm is tested on a set of standard benchmark problems. The results show that the proposed technique works very well on those benchmark problems.     

Packing Steiner trees: a cutting plane algorithm and computational results

In this paper we describe a cutting plane algorithm for the Steiner tree packing problem. We use our algorithm to solve some switchbox routing problems of VLSI-design and report on our computational experience. This includes a brief discussion of separation algorithms, a new LP-based primal heuristic and implementation details. The paper is based on the polyhedral theory for the Steiner tree packing polyhedron developed in our companion paper (this issue) and meant to turn this theory into an algorithmic tool for the solution of practical problems.     

Bird mating optimizer: An optimization algorithm inspired by bird mating strategies

Thanks to their simplicity and flexibility, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have attracted significant attention to tackle complex optimization problems. The underlying idea behind all EAs is the same and they differ only in technical details. In this paper, we propose a novel version of EAs, bird mating optimizer (BMO), for continuous optimization problems which is inspired by mating strategies of bird species during mating season. BMO imitates the behavior of bird species metaphorically to breed broods with superior genes for designing optimum searching techniques. On a large set of unimodal and multimodal benchmark functions, BMO represents a competitive performance to other EAs.     

Genetic algorithm with automatic termination and search space rotation

In the last two decades, numerous evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been developed for solving optimization problems. However, only a few works have focused on the question of the termination criteria. Indeed, EAs still need termination criteria prespecified by the user. In this paper, we develop a genetic algorithm (GA) with automatic termination and acceleration elements which allow the search to end without resort to predefined conditions. We call this algorithm “Genetic Algorithm with Automatic Termination and Search Space Rotation”, abbreviated as GATR. This algorithm utilizes the so-called “Gene Matrix” (GM) to equip the search process with a self-check in order to judge how much exploration has been performed, while maintaining the population diversity. The algorithm also implements a mutation operator called “mutagenesis” to achieve more efficient and faster exploration and exploitation processes. Moreover, GATR fully exploits the structure of the GM by calling a novel search space decomposition mechanism combined with a search space rotation procedure. As a result, the search operates strictly within two-dimensional subspaces irrespective of the dimension of the original problem. The computational experiments and comparisons with some state-of-the-art EAs demonstrate the effectiveness of the automatic termination criteria and the space decomposition mechanism of GATR.