A Forest Representation for Evolutionary Algorithms Applied to Network Design

Abstract. Network design involves several areas of engineering and science. Computer networks, electrical circuits, transportation problems, and phylogenetic trees are some examples. In general, these problems are NP-Hard. In order to deal with the complexity of these problems, several strategies have been proposed. Among them, approaches using evolutionary algorithms have achieved relevant results. However, the graph encoding is critical for the performance of such approaches in network design problems. Aiming to overcome this drawback, alternative representations of spanning trees have been developed. This article proposes an encoding for generation of spanning forests by evolutionary algorithms. 1 The Proposed Representation The proposed forest representation basically consists of linear lists (which may be an array T) containing the tree nodes and their depths. The order the pairs (node,depth) are disposed in the list is important and it must follow a preorder traversal. The forest...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: GECCO
• Authors: Alexandre C. B. Delbem, André Carlos Ponce Leon Ferreira de Carvalho
• Keywords: Forest Representation, GECCO 2003, Operator, Spanning Forest