I.
INTRODUCTION
395
Solution carrier
Optimization method
Control parameters
particles
particle position
Ant colony
optimization
ants
path of ants
Simulated annealing
molecules
molecule position
Particle swarm
optimization
Searching carrier
MCN
SN,
D , E , U , K , MCN
SN, T0,
O,E
, MCN
chromosome
SN, D , E , MCN
Genetic algorithm
individuals
coding
Artificial bee colony
food source
foraging bees
exploration and exploitation to food sources
SN, SQ, MCN
algorithm
position
* SN is the size of searching carriers, MCN stands for the termination condition. The meaning of other parameters can be found in related books.
BACKGROUND
396
(2)
max
j
and x
min
j
are the
1 / (1 abs ( fi )), f i 0
fiti
(4)
N (u )
D
i
III.
w 1 , puv {0,1} , 1 d u d M , 1 d v d N (u ) ,
1 i
N (u )
v 1
puv 1 , 1 d u d M
(5)
x2
x1
a) Continuous function
A. The Rationale
We prove the rationale of our approach by providing
analogies to continuous functions.
b) SSP
397
Continuous function
f ( x) 100 x , | x | 10
2
f ( x) 2 x 2 ( x 4) 2 , | x | 10
Numerical example
(8)
*
i, j
398
Notation
M
N
k
Opt ( Al )
Meaning
Number of tasks
Number of candidate services per task
Predefined neighbor size for DBA
Threshold ratio for TBA
(10)
399
Figure 6. DBAs performance w.r.t. the specific distance measurement method used
400
D. Further Discussion
The superior optimality achieved by TBA in both Figure
2 and 3 verifies that the property of optimality continuity
helps in improving the optimality of ABC. Both TBA and
DBA have theoretically higher time complexity than ABC.
However, experimental results indicate that, in many cases,
e.g., as shown by the second chart of Figure 3, TBA exhibits
significantly higher and more stable performance than ABC.
The reason is that TBA often requires less cycle of iterations
to converge due to the possession of optimality continuity.
To verify the tradeoff led by increased per-cycle cost and
improved convergence speed, we further define optimization
efficiency (OE) as Opt/Computation time. Table IV shows
that each algorithms OE value with respective to task
number, and presents an improvement measure of TBA over
ABC by calculating IMP=(OE(TBA)-OE(ABC))/OE(ABC).
As can be seen from Table IV, TBA consistently
achieves at least 20% higher OE than ABC, meaning under
different thresholds of acceptable time defined in the
experiments, TBA can obtain better results. This reveals that
TBA is not sensitive to task number and is especially suitable
for solving complex problems with multiple decision points.
In contrast to TBA, the undesirable outcome of DBA in
the experiments does not necessarily suggest it is incorrect in
principle. The reason for DBAs inferior performance might
be that all the implemented distance measures are unsuitable
for DBA. Hopefully a new distance measurement method
can totally reverse the situation.
Task#
ABC
DBA
TBA
IMP
10
22
23
44
1
20
35
35
49
0.4
30
45
41
58
0.3
40
48
40
59
0.2
50
48
41
59
0.2
60
44
45
62
0.4
70
44
44
59
0.3
80
46
43
61
0.3
90
47
44
56
0.2
100
41
42
57
0.4
V. RELATED WORK
SSP has been solved by various swarm-based algorithms
such as simulated annealing (SA), PSO, genetic algorithms
(GA), and ant colony optimization (ACO) [14]. Though
ABC has proven superior in many problems [1][5][7][8] and
been verified by various applications [15][16][17], it is rarely
adopted to SSP. Existing related work is limited: Chifu et al.
[18] define a 1-OPT heuristic for ABC in solving semantic
web service composition problems; Kousalya et al. [11] use
Bees Algorithm (BA) to solve SSP. BA differs from ABC in
that more bees are sent to better food sources so as to
accelerate convergence. But it is more complex, with totally
seven control parameters than that of three in ABC.
Neighborhood structure plays a significant role in local
search as the time complexity of a search depends on the size
of the neighborhood and the computational cost of the moves
[19]. So a related key issue is to build an effective and
efficient neighborhood search mechanism for ABC. Existing
related work can be classified into three categories as follows:
1) Defining new neighborhood search strategies:
different operators have been proposed for ABC to obtain
neighbors in job/flow shop scheduling [20][21][22], vechile
routing [23][24] and TSP [25][26][27]. These operators
include point-to-point random swap or insertion, swap or
insertion and reversing of subsequence. Tasgetiren et al. [28]
fuse variable neighborhood search (VNS) into ABC, which
allows the neighborhood structure to change with evolution.
They further combines VNS with above operators to solve
flow shop scheduling problem [20].
401
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
402