Metaheuristics and cooperative approaches for the Bi-objective Ring Star Problem

Arnaud Liefooghe (1, 2) , Laetitia Jourdan (1, 2) , El-Ghazali Talbi (2, 1)

1 LIFL - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille
2 DOLPHIN - Parallel Cooperative Multi-criteria Optimization

This paper presents and investigates different approaches to solve a new bi-objective routing problem called the ring star problem. It consists of locating a simple cycle through a subset of nodes of a graph while optimizing two kinds of cost. The first objective is the minimization of a ring cost that is related to the length of the cycle. The second one is the minimization of an assignment cost from non-visited nodes to visited ones. In spite of its obvious bi-objective formulation, this problem has always been investigated in a single-objective way. To tackle the bi-objective ring star problem, we first investigate different stand-alone search methods. Then, we propose two cooperative strategies that combine two multi-objective metaheuristics: an elitist evolutionary algorithm and a population-based local search. We apply these new hybrid approaches to well-known benchmark test instances and demonstrate their effectiveness in comparison to non-hybrid algorithms and to state-of-the-art methods.

Mots clés: Ring star problem; Multi-objective optimization; Metaheuristic; Cooperative approach

Domaines: Recherche opérationnelle [math.OC]

Arnaud Liefooghe, Laetitia Jourdan, El-Ghazali Talbi. Metaheuristics and cooperative approaches for the Bi-objective Ring Star Problem. Computers and Operations Research, 2010, 37 (6), pp.1033 - 1044. ⟨10.1016/j.cor.2009.09.004⟩. ⟨hal-00522622⟩