Authors:
Jaroslav Janacek
and
Marek Kvet
Affiliation:
Faculty of Management Science and Informatics, University of Žilina, Univerzitná 8215/1, 010 26 Žilina, Slovakia
Keyword(s):
Location, Emergency Medical Service System, Approximate Approach, Evolutionary Algorithm, Meme.
Abstract:
Emergency medical service system design attracts attention of a broad researcher and practitioner community due to increasing public demand for more safe life. A basic model of the design problem is known as the weighted p-median problem. Large instances of the problem as are hard to solve in general and very often it is necessary to obtain a series of solutions to be able to offer a spectrum of various solutions. For this purpose, an evolutionary metaheuristic seems to be a suitable tool, as it processes simultaneously a family of solutions. A standard evolutionary algorithm is based on developing a population using some nature inspired operations with solutions-members of the population, which produce candidates for population updating. This evolutionary process is characterized by fast improvement of the best-found-solution at the beginning and very slow improvement at the end, when the best-found-solution is near to the optimal one. To improve the first phase of the evolutionary
process, numerous authors recommend to plug increasing procedures called memes in the process. Within this paper, we will study an impact of the meme plugin on acceleration of the evolutionary process, when big instances of the weighted p-media problem are solved. The study will be performed on instances of an emergency service system design problem solved by genetic algorithm with elite set and the studied meme will be based on exchange neighborhood searching.
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