Viral systems : a new bio-inspired optimisation approach

The paper presents a new approach to deal with combinatorial problems. It makes use of a biological analogy inspired by the performance of viruses. The replication mechanism, as well as the hosts’ infection processes is used to generate a metaheuristic that allows the obtention of valuable results....

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Cortés, Pablo; García Sánchez, José Manuel; Muñuzuri, Jesús; Onieva, Luis
Format: Article
Status:Published version
Publication date:2008
Country:España
Institution:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repository:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/38657
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11441/38657
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2006.12.018
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Virus
Optimisation
Metaheuristic
Artificial intelligence
Steiner tree
Description
Summary:The paper presents a new approach to deal with combinatorial problems. It makes use of a biological analogy inspired by the performance of viruses. The replication mechanism, as well as the hosts’ infection processes is used to generate a metaheuristic that allows the obtention of valuable results. The viral system (VS) theoretical context is described and it is applied to a library of medium-to-large-sized cases of the Steiner problem for which the optimal solution is known. The method is compared with the metaheuristics that have provided the best results for the Steiner problem. The VS provides better solutions than genetic algorithms and certain tabu search approaches. For the most sophisticated tabu search approaches (the best metaheuristic approximations to the Steiner problem solution) VS provides solutions of similar quality.