Abstract
Developing techniques for optimal allocation of limited resources to a set of activities has received increasing attention in recent years. In this paper, an efficient resource allocation scheme based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is developed. Different from many existing evolutionary algorithms for solving resource allocation problems (RAPs), this PSO algorithm incorporates a novel representation of each particle in the population and a comprehensive learning strategy for the PSO search process. The novelty of this representation lies in that the position of each particle is represented by a pair of points, one on each side of the constraint hyper-plane in the problem space. The line joining these two points intersects the constraint hyper-plane and their intersection point indicates a feasible solution. With the evaluation value of the feasible solution used as the fitness value of the particle, such a representation provides an effective way to ensure the equality resource constraints in RAPs are met. Without the distraction of infeasible solutions, the particle thus searches the space smoothly. In addition, particles search for optimal solutions by learning from themselves and their neighborhood using the comprehensive learning strategy, helping prevent premature convergence and improve the solution quality for multimodal problems. This new algorithm is shown to be applicable to both single-objective and multiobjective RAPs, with performance validated by a number of benchmarks and by a real-world bed capacity planning problem. Experimental results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 6148273 |
Pages (from-to) | 801-816 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation |
Volume | 16 |
Issue number | 6 |
Early online date | 7 Feb 2012 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 10 Dec 2012 |
Funding
Manuscript received December 26, 2010; revised April 21, 2011 and August 17, 2011; accepted October 10, 2011. Date of publication February 7, 2012; date of current version November 27, 2012. This work was supported in part by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars under Grant 61125205, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61070004, and in part by the NSFC Joint Fund with Guangdong under Key Project U0835002. For additional information regarding this paper please contact Jun Zhang (corresponding author).
Keywords
- bed capacity planning
- multiobjective resource allocation problem (MORAP)
- particle swarm optimization (PSO)
- resource allocation problem (RAP)