Stochastic evolution: a fast effective heuristic for some generic layout problems

Abstract

There are two canonical optimization problems, network bisectioning (NB) and traveling salesman (TS), that emerge from the physical design and layout of integrated circuits. An analogy is used between iterative techniques for combinatorial optimization and the evolution of biological species to obtain the stochastic evolution (SE) heuristic for solving a wide range of combinatorial optimization problems. It is shown that SE can be specifically tailored to solve both NB and TS. Experimental results for the NB and TS problems show that the SE algorithm produces better quality solutions and is faster than the simulated annealing algorithm in all instances considered.<>