Network Models and Optimization - Decision Engineering (Hardcover)

Many real-world problems from operations research (OR) / management science (MS) are very complex in nature and quite hard to solve by conventional optimiza- tion techniques. Since the 1960s there has been being an increasing interest in imi- tating living beings to solve such kinds of hard optimization problems.
Simulating natural evolutionary processes of human beings results in stochastic optimization techniques called evolutionary algorithms (EAs) that can often outperform conven- tional optimization methods when applied to difficult real-world problems.
EAs mostly involve metaheuristic optimization algorithms such as genetic algorithms (GA) [1, 2], evolutionary programming (EP) [3], evolution strategys (ES) [4, 5], genetic programming (GP) [6, 7], learning classifier systems (LCS) [8], swarm in- telligence (comprising ant colony optimization (ACO) [9] and particle swarm op- timization (PSO) [10, 11]). Among them, genetic algorithms are perhaps the most widely known type of evolutionary algorithms used today.