An Evolutionary Algorithm with Stochastic Hill-Climbing for the Edge-Biconnectivity Augmentation Problem

Augmenting an existing network with additional links to achieve higher robustness and survivability plays an important role in network design. We consider the problem of augmenting a network with links of minimum total cost in order to make it edge-biconnected, i.e. the failure of a single link will never disconnect any two nodes. A new evolutionary algorithm is proposed that works directly on the set of additional links of a candidate solution. Problem-specific initialization, recombination, and mutation operators use a stochastic hill-climbing procedure. With low computational effort, only locally optimal, feasible candidate solutions are produced. Experimental results are significantly better than those of a previous genetic algorithm concerning final solutions’ qualities and especially execution times.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: EVOW
• Authors: Ivana Ljubic, Günther R. Raidl
• Keywords: Additional Links, Artificial Intelligence, Candidate Solutions, EVOW 2001, Minimum Total Cost