Evolutionary codings and operators for the terminal assignment problem

Given a collection of terminals, each with a demand, a collection of concentrators, each with a capacity, and costs of connecting the terminals to the concentrators, the terminal assignment problem seeks a set of such connections of minimum cost and without the total demand at any concentrator exceeding its capacity. One genetic algorithm for this problem encodes candidate solutions as strings of concentrator labels; in three other GAs, chromosomes are permutations of terminal labels decoded by a greedy decoder. In comparisons on 40 instances of the problem, the string-coded GA consistently performs poorly, while among the three permutationcoded GAs, one that applies only mutation almost always outperforms the other two, which use crossover operators as well as mutation. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO–2009 (G¨unther Raidl et al., Editors), pp.1805–1806. New York: ACM Press. Categories and Subject Descriptors G.2.1 [Mathematics of Comp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: GECCO
• Authors: Bryant A. Julstrom
• Keywords: GECCO 2009, Keywords Terminal Assignment, Optimization, Problem Encodes Candidate, Terminal Assignment Problem