Parallel Metaheuristics

Solving complex optimization problems with parallel metaheuristics Parallel Metaheuristics brings together an international group of experts in parallelism and metaheuristics to provide a much-needed synthesis of these two fields. Readers discover how metaheuristic techniques can provide useful and practical solutions for a wide range of problems and application domains, with an emphasis on the fields of telecommunications and bioinformatics. This volume fills a long-existing gap, allowing researchers and practitioners to develop efficient metaheuristic algorithms to find solutions. The book is divided into three parts: * Part One: Introduction to Metaheuristics and Parallelism, including an Introduction to Metaheuristic Techniques, Measuring the Performance of Parallel Metaheuristics, New Technologies in Parallelism, and a head-to-head discussion on Metaheuristics and Parallelism * Part Two: Parallel Metaheuristic Models, including Parallel Genetic Algorithms, Parallel Genetic Programming, Parallel Evolution Strategies, Parallel Ant Colony Algorithms, Parallel Estimation of Distribution Algorithms, Parallel Scatter Search, Parallel Variable Neighborhood Search, Parallel Simulated Annealing, Parallel Tabu Search, Parallel GRASP, Parallel Hybrid Metaheuristics, Parallel Multi-Objective Optimization, and Parallel Heterogeneous Metaheuristics * Part Three: Theory and Applications, including Theory of Parallel Genetic Algorithms, Parallel Metaheuristics Applications, Parallel Metaheuristics in Telecommunications, and a final chapter on Bioinformatics and Parallel Metaheuristics Each self-contained chapter begins with clear overviews and introductions that bring the reader up to speed, describes basic techniques, and ends with a reference list for further study. Packed with numerous tables and figures to illustrate the complex theory and processes, this comprehensive volume also includes numerous practical real-world optimization problems and their solutions. This is essential reading for students and researchers in computer science, mathematics, and engineering who deal with parallelism, metaheuristics, and optimization in general.

A unified view of metaheuristics This book provides a complete background on metaheuristics and shows readers how to design and implement efficient algorithms to solve complex optimization problems across a diverse range of applications, from networking and bioinformatics to engineering design, routing, and scheduling. It presents the main design questions for all families of metaheuristics and clearly illustrates how to implement the algorithms under a software framework to reuse both the design and code. Throughout the book, the key search components of metaheuristics are considered as a toolbox for: Designing efficient metaheuristics (e.g. local search, tabu search, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm optimization, scatter search, ant colonies, bee colonies, artificial immune systems) for optimization problems Designing efficient metaheuristics for multi-objective optimization problems Designing hybrid, parallel, and distributed metaheuristics Implementing metaheuristics on sequential and parallel machines Using many case studies and treating design and implementation independently, this book gives readers the skills necessary to solve large-scale optimization problems quickly and efficiently. It is a valuable reference for practicing engineers and researchers from diverse areas dealing with optimization or machine learning; and graduate students in computer science, operations research, control, engineering, business and management, and applied mathematics.

The third edition of this handbook is designed to provide a broad coverage of the concepts, implementations, and applications in metaheuristics. The book’s chapters serve as stand-alone presentations giving both the necessary underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation. The nature of metaheuristics invites an analyst to modify basic methods in response to problem characteristics, past experiences, and personal preferences, and the chapters in this handbook are designed to facilitate this process as well. This new edition has been fully revised and features new chapters on swarm intelligence and automated design of metaheuristics from flexible algorithm frameworks. The authors who have contributed to this volume represent leading figures from the metaheuristic community and are responsible for pioneering contributions to the fields they write about. Their collective work has significantly enriched the field of optimization in general and combinatorial optimization in particular.Metaheuristics are solution methods that orchestrate an interaction between local improvement procedures and higher level strategies to create a process capable of escaping from local optima and performing a robust search of a solution space. In addition, many new and exciting developments and extensions have been observed in the last few years. Hybrids of metaheuristics with other optimization techniques, like branch-and-bound, mathematical programming or constraint programming are also increasingly popular. On the front of applications, metaheuristics are now used to find high-quality solutions to an ever-growing number of complex, ill-defined real-world problems, in particular combinatorial ones. This handbook should continue to be a great reference for researchers, graduate students, as well as practitioners interested in metaheuristics.

This three-volume set LNCS 12452, 12453, and 12454 constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing, ICA3PP 2020, in New York City, NY, USA, in October 2020. The total of 142 full papers and 5 short papers included in this proceedings volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 495 submissions. ICA3PP is covering the many dimensions of parallel algorithms and architectures, encompassing fundamental theoretical approaches, practical experimental projects, and commercial components and systems. As applications of computing systems have permeated in every aspects of daily life, the power of computing system has become increasingly critical. This conference provides a forum for academics and practitioners from countries around the world to exchange ideas for improving the efficiency, performance, reliability, security and interoperability of computing systems and applications. ICA3PP 2020 focus on two broad areas of parallel and distributed computing, i.e. architectures, algorithms and networks, and systems and applications.

This text provides an excellent balance of theory and application that enables you to deploy powerful algorithms, frameworks, and methodologies to solve complex optimization problems in a diverse range of industries. Each chapter is written by leading experts in the fields of parallel and distributed optimization. Collectively, the contributions serve as a complete reference to the field of combinatorial optimization, including details and findings of recent and ongoing investigations.

Big Data is a new field, with many technological challenges to be understood in order to use it to its full potential. These challenges arise at all stages of working with Big Data, beginning with data generation and acquisition. The storage and management phase presents two critical challenges: infrastructure, for storage and transportation, and conceptual models. Finally, to extract meaning from Big Data requires complex analysis. Here the authors propose using metaheuristics as a solution to these challenges; they are first able to deal with large size problems and secondly flexible and therefore easily adaptable to different types of data and different contexts. The use of metaheuristics to overcome some of these data mining challenges is introduced and justified in the first part of the book, alongside a specific protocol for the performance evaluation of algorithms. An introduction to metaheuristics follows. The second part of the book details a number of data mining tasks, including clustering, association rules, supervised classification and feature selection, before explaining how metaheuristics can be used to deal with them. This book is designed to be self-contained, so that readers can understand all of the concepts discussed within it, and to provide an overview of recent applications of metaheuristics to knowledge discovery problems in the context of Big Data.

The main goal of this book is to provide a state of the art of hybrid metaheuristics. The book provides a complete background that enables readers to design and implement hybrid metaheuristics to solve complex optimization problems (continuous/discrete, mono-objective/multi-objective, optimization under uncertainty) in a diverse range of application domains. Readers learn to solve large scale problems quickly and efficiently combining metaheuristics with complementary metaheuristics, mathematical programming, constraint programming and machine learning. Numerous real-world examples of problems and solutions demonstrate how hybrid metaheuristics are applied in such fields as networks, logistics and transportation, bio-medical, engineering design, scheduling.

This book explores the methodological and application developments of network design in transportation and logistics. It identifies trends, challenges and research perspectives in network design for these areas. Network design is a major class of problems in operations research where network flow, combinatorial and mixed integer optimization meet. The analysis and planning of transportation and logistics systems continues to be one of the most important application areas of operations research. Networks provide the natural way of depicting such systems, so the optimal design and operation of networks is the main methodological area of operations research that is used for the analysis and planning of these systems. This book defines the current state of the art in the general area of network design, and then turns to its applications to transportation and logistics. New research challenges are addressed. Network Design with Applications to Transportation and Logistics is divided into three parts. Part I examines basic design problems including fixed-cost network design and parallel algorithms. After addressing the basics, Part II focuses on more advanced models. Chapters cover topics such as multi-facility network design, flow-constrained network design, and robust network design. Finally Part III is dedicated entirely to the potential application areas for network design. These areas range from rail networks, to city logistics, to energy transport. All of the chapters are written by leading researchers in the field, which should appeal to analysts and planners.