Evolutionary Network Optimization: Hybrid Genetic Algorithms Approach

Network optimization is being increasingly important and fundamental issue in the fields such as engineering, computer science, operations research, transportation, telecommunication, decision support systems, manufacturing, and airline scheduling. Networks provide a useful way to modeling real world problems and are extensively used in practice. Many real world applications impose on more complex issues, such as, complex structure, complex constraints, and multiple objects to be handled simultaneously and make the problem intractable to the traditional approaches. Recent advances in evolutionary computation have made it possible to solve such practical network optimization problems. The invited talk introduces a thorough treatment of evolutionary approaches, i.e., hybrid genetic algorithms approach to network optimization problems, such as, fixed charge transportation problem, minimum cost and maximum flow problem, minimum spanning tree problem, multiple project scheduling problems, scheduling problem in FMS.