Abstract
In dynamic optimization problems, changes occur over time. These changes could be related to the optimization objective, the problem instance, or involve problem constraints. In most cases, they are seen as an ordered sequence of sub-problems or environments that must be solved during a certain time interval. The usual approaches tend to solve each sub-problem when a change happens, dealing always with one single environment at each time instant. In this paper, we propose a multi-environmental cooperative model for parallel meta-heuristics to tackle dynamic optimization problems. It consists in dealing with different environments at the same time, using different algorithms that exchange information coming from these environments. A parallel multi-swarm approach is presented for solving the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested on a well-known set of benchmarks, and compared with other meta-heuristics from the literature. Experimental results show that our multi-environmental approach outperforms conventional meta-heuristics on this problem.
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Acknowledgements
Authors acknowledge funds from the Associated Teams Program MOMDI of the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), the Spanish Ministry of Sciences and Innovation European FEDER under contracts TIN2008-06491-C04-01 (M* project) and TIN2011-28194 (roadME project), and CICE, Junta de Andalucía under contract P07-TIC-03044 (DIRICOM project). The experiments were carried out using the Grid’5000 experimental testbed, being developed under the INRIA ALADDIN development action with support from CNRS, RENATER, and several universities as well as other funding bodies. Briseida Sarasola acknowledges grant AP2009-1680 from the Spanish government.
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Khouadjia, M.R., Talbi, EG., Jourdan, L. et al. Multi-environmental cooperative parallel metaheuristics for solving dynamic optimization problems. J Supercomput 63, 836–853 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-012-0774-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-012-0774-x