New variable-length data compression scheme for solution representation of meta-heuristics

摘要

Solution representation is an important aspect of the development of a meta-heuristic. However, most meta-heuristics focus on the algorithm aspect rather than the solution representation. As the scale of the optimization problem under study rises, the solution representation becomes ever more crucial because the computational performance tends to deteriorate for three reasons: (1) increased landscape complexity, (2) exponential growth of search space, and (3) costly function evaluation. In this study, data compression of solution representation is explored to improve the performance of meta-heuristics in terms of compression efficiency and solution quality. A proposed new data compression scheme variable-length solution representation compression for meta-heuristics - is developed and tested against benchmarked problem instances from the quadratic assignment problem library (QAPLIB) and additional large problem instances. The analyzed results indicate that the compressed solution representation scheme under a meta-heuristic framework performs well against the QAPLIB and large problem instances with less space complexity and computation time. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.