Abstract
Solving combinatorial optimization problems is an important challenge in all engineering applications. Researchers have been extensively solving these problems using evolutionary computations. This paper introduces a novel learning-based multi-agent system (LBMAS) in which all agents cooperate by acting on a common population and a two-stage archive containing promising fitness-based and positional-based solutions found so far. Metaheuristics as agents perform their own method individually and then share their outcomes. This way, even though individual performance may be low, collaboration of metaheuristics leads the system to reach high performance. In this system, solutions are modified by all running metaheuristics and the system learns gradually how promising metaheuristics are, in order to apply them based on their effectiveness. Finally, the performance of LBMAS is experimentally evaluated on Multiprocessor Scheduling Problem (MSP) which is an outstanding combinatorial optimization problem. Obtained results in comparison to well-known competitors show that our multi-agent system achieves better results in reasonable running times.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Goldberg, D.E.: Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization and Machine Learning. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Boston (1989)
Acan, A., Unveren, A.: A two-stage memory powered Great Deluge algorithm for global optimization. J. Soft Comput. (2014).
Price, K.V.: An introduction to differential evolution. In: Corne, D., Dorgio, M., Glover, F., Dasgupta, D., Moscato, P., Poli, R., Price, K.V. (eds.) New Ideas in Optimization. McGraw-Hill, London (1999)
Storn, R., Price, K.: Differential evolution - a simple and efficient heuristic for global optimization over continuous spaces. J. Global Optim. 11(4), 341–359 (1997)
Bertsimas, D., Tsitsiklis, J.: Simulated annealing. Stat. Sci. 8(1), 10–15 (1993)
Dorigo, M., Caro, G.D., Lotfi, N.: The ant colony optimizationmeta-heuristic. In: Corne, D., Dorgio, M., Glover, F., Dasgupta, D., moscato, P., Poli, R., Price, K.V. (eds.) New Ideas in Optimization, pp. 11–32. McGraw-Hill, New York (1999)
Dueck, G.: New optimization heuristics, the great deluge algorithm and the record-to-record travel. J. Comput. Phys. 104(1), 86–92 (1993)
Chelouah, R., Siarry, P.: Tabu search applied to global optimization. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 123(2), 256–270 (2000)
Naeem, M., Xue. S., Lee, D.C.: Cross-entropy optimization for sensor selection problems: communications and information technology. In: ISCIT 2009, pp. 396–401, September 2009
Sycara, K.P.: Multi-agent systems: american association for artificial intelligence. AI Mag. 19(2), 79–92 (1998)
Meignan, D., Creput, J.C., Koukam, A.: An organizational view of metaheuristics. In: Proceedings of First International Workshop on Optimization on Multi-agent Systems, pp. 77–85 (2008)
Taillard, E.D., Gambardella, L.M., Gendrau, M., Potvin, J.Y.: Adaptive memory programming: a unified view of metaheuristics. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 135, 1–16 (2001)
Cadenas, J.M., Garrido, M.C., Munoz, E.: Construction of a cooperative metaheuristic system based on data mining and soft-computing: methodological issues. In: Proceedings of IPMU 2008, pp. 1246–1253 (2008)
Aydin, M.E.: Coordinating metaheuristic agents with swarm intelligence. J. Intell. Manuf. 23(4), 991–999 (2013)
Milano, M., Roli, A.: MAGMA: a multi-agent architecture for metaheuristics. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. B Cybern. 33(2), 925–941 (2004)
Al-Mouhamed, M.A.: Lower bound on the number of processors and time for scheduling precedence graphs with communication costs. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 16(12), 1390–1401 (1990)
Wu, A.S., Yu, H., Jin, S., Lin, KCh., Schiavone, G.: An incremental genetic algorithm approach to multiprocessor scheduling. IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst. 15(9), 824–834 (2004)
Wu, M.Y.: MCP Revisited. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. University of New Mexico (2000)
Baxter, J., Patel, J.H.:The last algorithm: a heuristic-based static task allocation algorithm. In: Proceeding of International Conference on Parallel Processing, vol. 2, pp. 217−222 (1989)
Coffman, E.G.: Computer and Job-Shop Scheduling Theory. Wiley, New York (1976)
Hwang, J.J., Chow, Y.C., Anger, F.D., Lee, C.Y.: Scheduling precedence graphs in systems with inter-processor communication times. SIAM J. Comput. 18(2), 244–257 (1989)
Kim, S.J., Browne, J. C.: A general approach to mapping of parallel computation upon multiprocessor architectures. In: Proceeding Of International Conference on Parallel Processing, Vol. 2 pp. 1−8 (1988)
Sarkar, V.: Partitioning and Scheduling Parallel Programs for Multiprocessors. MIT Press, Cambridge (1989)
McCreary, C.L., Khan, A.A., Thompson, J.J., McArdle, M.E.: A comparison of heuristics for scheduling dags on multiprocessors. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Parallel Processing Symposium, pp. 446–451 (1994)
Rinehart, M., Kianzad, V., Bhattacharyya, SH.S.: A Modular Genetic Algorithm for Scheduling Task Graphs. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland, College Park (2003)
Correa, R.C., Ferreira, A., Rebreyend, P.: Scheduling multiprocessor tasks with genetic algorithms. IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst. 10(8), 825–837 (1999)
Parsa, S., Lotfi, S., Lotfi, N.: An evolutionary approach to task graph scheduling. In: Beliczynski, B., Dzielinski, A., Iwanowski, M., Ribeiro, B. (eds.) ICANNGA 2007. LNCS, vol. 4431, pp. 110–119. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Sih, G.C., Lee, E.A.: Scheduling to account for inter-processor communication within interconnection-constrained processor network. In: 1990 International Conference on Parallel Processing, pp. 9–17, August 1990
El-Rewini, H., Lewis, T.G.: Scheduling parallel program tasks onto arbitrary target machines. J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 9(2), 138–153 (1990)
Ahmad, E., Dhodhi, M.K., Ahmad, I.: Multiprocessor scheduling by simulated evolution. J. Softw. 5(10), 1128–1136 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lotfi, N., Acan, A. (2015). Learning-Based Multi-agent System for Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems: A New Architecture. In: Onieva, E., Santos, I., Osaba, E., Quintián, H., Corchado, E. (eds) Hybrid Artificial Intelligent Systems. HAIS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9121. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19644-2_27
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19644-2_27
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19643-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19644-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)