FPGA-Based Implementation of Genetic Algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem and Its Industrial Application

Abstract

Abstract.In this paper an adaptive distribution system for manufacturing applications is considered and examined. The system receives a set of various components at a source point and supplies these components to destination points. The objective is to minimize the total distance that has to be traveled. At each destination point some control algorithms have to be activated and each segment of motion between destination points has also to be controlled. The paper suggests a model for such a distribution system based on autonomous sub-algorithms that can further be linked hierarchically. The links are set up during execution time (during motion) with the aid of the results obtained from solving the respective traveling salesman problem (TSP) that gives a proper tour of minimal length. The paper proposes an FPGA-based solution, which integrates a specialized virtual controller implementing hierarchical control algorithms and a hardware realization of genetic algorithm for the TSP.

FPGA Implementation of Crossover Module of Genetic Algorithm

“…Since most of the existing hardware implementations are complete GA algorithm [9,11,12], they reported the quality of solutions and the search speed as performance metrics, so, there is no crossover performance evaluation individually and independently. Whereas detailed information of crossover module is presented only in Reference [5], therefore, we can only compare our simulation results with the reported results of that work. As we compare our implementation to the one proposed in Reference [5], from now on we refer to it as the baseline architecture.…”

“…GA is one of the many alternatives that our results show that is not well suited to TSP. In this age, neural networks (NNs) are more popular than GA, but GAs are still used because NNs require a lot of data, while GAs do not [5].…”

“…Since, in this paper, PMX crossover technique is investigated, the following is a detailed review of PMX implementation. In Reference [5], the GA algorithm is implemented in a software application developed in C++ language and only the crossover module is implemented in FPGA. The proposed architecture of crossover circuit is depicted in Figure 3.…”

Hardware Implementation of 2-Opt Local Search Algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem

“…As far as we know, there has been very little work done on how these algorithms could be ported to hardware. A couple of hardware implementations of genetic algorithms for the TSP can be seen in the references [9] [10], but they are slower than the proposed solution since they yield significantly less parallelism.…”

A Special-Purpose Architecture for Solving the Breakpoint Median Problem

“…Also note that although there has been previous work in designing FPGA architectures for the TSP problem, to our knowledge all of this work involved approximate solvers using genetic algorithms [24]- [26]. Since our goal is to find exact solutions of the breakpoint, this previous work is not directly applicable to this application.…”