A study of topology in insular Parallel Genetic Algorithms

Abstract

In this paper we study how the connectivity affects the performance of insular Parallel Genetic Algorithms (PGAs). Seven topologies PGAs were proposed, with growing number of connections. We used three instances of the well-known traveling salesman problem as benchmark. Each island of the PGA had different parameters and we established a fixed migration policy for all islands. Experiments were done and average results were reported. The effect of coevolution in PGAs was evidenced. The convergence time increased with the number of connections of the topology. The quality of solutions also increased in the same way. Although topologies with large connectivity increases the overall processing time, they take benefits to the quality of solutions found.

Parallelism, hybridism and coevolution in a multi‐level ABC‐GA approach for the protein structure prediction problem

“…Future work will focus on different topologies , a deep study of the migration policy between islands and local search strategies to improve the quality of the exploration of the search space, as well as to avoid stagnation in local maxima. Certainly, such improvements will require more computational power.…”

“…It is known that population‐based metaheuristics can explore efficiently the use of parallel and distributed computing concepts to speed up the search process. For instance, in , the authors analyzed different topologies of an insular parallel GA. In , the authors used a master‐slave model to compare both synchronous and asynchronous PSO versions in an engineering problem.…”

Parallel Approaches for the Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

“…Besides, it is also defined some criteria for selection of immigrants and substitution of emigrants. Although the topology and connectivity between islands has some influence in the convergence of the algorithm and its quality [26], we preferred to use the simplest approach: a unidirectional ring. That is, each island sends immigrants to only one other island, and each island receives emigrants only from one other island.…”