Discrete differential evolution algorithm for solving the terminal assignment problem

Abstract

Terminal Assignment is an important problem in telecommunication networks. The main objective is to assign a given collection of terminals to a given collection of concentrators. In this paper, we propose a Discrete Differential Evolution (DDE) algorithm for solving the Terminal Assignment problem. Differential Evolution algorithm is an evolutionary computation algorithm. This method has proved to be of practical success in a variety of problem domains. However, it does not perform well on dealing with Terminal Assignment problem because it uses discrete decision variables. To remedy this, a DDE algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. The results are compared to those given by some existing heuristics. We show that the proposed DDE algorithm is able to achieve feasible solutions to Terminal Assignment instances, improving the results obtained by previous approaches. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.