An Initial Study of the Multi-Constraint Routing Problem Using Genetic Algorithm

Multi-constrained quality-of-service routing (QoSR) is to find a feasible path that satisfies multiple constraints simultaneously, which has been proved to be an NPC problem. In this paper, we propose a GA-based algorithm to solve this problem. The main contribution of this paper is that it invented a new encoding scheme and associated genetic operations which could be used in a class of related problems. For the specific problem we are studying, the experiment result shows that with very small number of iterations and population, it could achieve very hight success ration (SR). Although it does not rival SA MCP in terms of average performance in the simulation we did, it is still valuable in that: (1) it is internally parallel; (2) it can be combined with SA MCP to yield a more efficient algorithm; (3) it has potential to tackle tougher problems.