Tailoring a Red Deer Algorithm to Solve a Generalized Network Design Problem

Abstract

: This work investigates solving a challenging network design problem using the recently introduced evolutionary metaheuristic, namely the Red Deer Algorithm (RDA), that mimics the Scottish Red Deer’s behavior during their breeding season. The RDA is tailored to solve a generalized network design problem that aims to design a network with minimal cost while satisfying several practical constraints. To assess the performance of this new bio-inspired metaheuristic on solving such NP-hard problem, computational experiments were conducted on Benchmark as well as real-world instances. Computational experimentation illustrates the accuracy of the RDA that outperforms all of the existing recent metaheuristics.