Efficient multi-processor scheduling is essentially the problem of allocating a set of computational jobs to a set of processors to minimise the overall execution time. There are many variations of this problem, most of which are NP-hard, so we must rely on heuristics to solve real world problem instances. This dissertation describes several novel approaches using the ant colony optimisation (A...

Ant colony system (ACS) algorithm is one of the biologically inspired algorithms that have been introduced to effectively solve a variety of combinatorial optimisation problems. In literature, ACS has been employed to solve DNA sequence design problem. The DNA sequence design problem was modelled based on a finite state machine in which the nodes represent the DNA bases {A, C, T, G}. Later in 2...

The graph-partitioning problem arises as a fundamental problem in many important scientific and engineering applications. A variety of optimisation methods are used for solving this problem and among them the meta-heuristics outstand for its efficiency and robustness. Here, we address the performance of the distributed multilevel ant-colony algorithm (DMACA), a meta-heuristic approach for solvi...

The introduction of NVidia’s powerful Tesla GPU hardware and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) platform enable many-core parallel programming. As a result, existing algorithms implemented on a GPU can run many times faster than on modern CPUs. Relatively little research has been done so far on GPU implementations of discrete optimisation algorithms. In this paper, two approaches to par...

An improved version of the Bees Algorithm is proposed for solving dynamic optimisation problems. This new formulation of the Bees Algorithm includes new search operators, and a new selection procedure that enhances the survival probability of newly formed individuals. The proposed algorithm is tested on six benchmark dynamic optimisation problems. The benchmark problems include minimisation and...

It is only relatively recently that extremal optimisation (EO) has been applied to combinatorial optimisation problems. As such, there have been only a few attempts to extend the paradigm to include standard search mechanisms that are routinely used by other techniques such as genetic algorithms, tabu search and ant colony optimisation. The key way to begin this process is to augment EO with at...

Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) is a constructive metaheuristic that uses an analogue of ant trail pheromones to learn about good features of solutions. ACO implementations are typically tailored in an ad hoc manner to suit particular problems. Critically, the pheromone representation for a particular problem is usually chosen intuitively rather than by following any systematic process. In some r...

The automotive deployment problem is a real-world constrained multiobjective assignment problem in which software components must be allocated to processing units distributed around a car’s chassis. Prior work has shown that evolutionary algorithms such as NSGA-II can produce good quality solutions to this problem. This paper presents a population-based ant colony optimisation (PACO) approach t...

This paper is concerned with a dynamic vehicle routing problem. The problem is dynamic in the sense that the time it will take to traverse each edge is uncertain. The problem is expressed as a bi-criterion optimisation with the mutually exclusive aims of minimising both the total mean transit time and the total variance in transit time. In this paper we introduce a hybrid dynamic programming an...

Software design is crucial to successful software development, yet is a demanding multi-objective problem for software engineers. In an attempt to assist the software designer, interactive (i.e. human in-the-loop) meta-heuristic search techniques such as evolutionary computing have been applied and show promising results. Recent investigations have also shown that Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) ...