Distributed Cooperative Co-evolution with Adaptive Computing Resource Allocation for Large Scale Optimization

Through introducing the divide-and-conquer strategy, cooperative co-evolution has been successfully employed by many evolutionary algorithms to solve large-scale optimization problems. In practice, it is common that different subcomponents of a large-scale problem have imbalanced contributions to the global fitness. Thus how to utilize such imbalance and concentrate efforts on optimizing important subcomponents becomes an important issue for improving performance of cooperative co-evolutionary algorithm, especially in distributed computing environment. In this paper, we propose a two-layer distributed cooperative co-evolution architecture with adaptive computing resource allocation for large-scale optimization. The first layer is the distributed cooperative co-evolution model which takes charge of calculating the importance of subcomponents and accordingly allocating resources. An effective allocating algorithm is designed which can adaptively allocate computing resources based on a periodic contribution calculating method. The second layer is the pool model which takes charge of making fully utilization of imbalanced resource allocation. Within this layer, two different conformance policies are designed to help optimizers use the assigned computing resources efficiently. Empirical studies show that the two conformance policies and the computing resource allocation algorithm are effective, and the proposed distributed architecture possesses high scalability and efficiency.