Evolutionary algorithms refining a heuristic: A hybrid method for shared-path protections in WDM networks under SRLG constraints

An evolutionary algorithm (EA) can be used to tune the control parameters of a construction heuristic to an optimization problem and generate a nearly optimal solution. This approach is in the spirit of indirect encoding EAs. Its performance relies on both the heuristic and the EA. This paper proposes a three-phase parameterized construction heuristic for the shared-path protection problem in wavelength division multiplexing networks with shared-risk link group constraints and applies an EA for optimizing the control parameters of the proposed heuristics. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective on all the tested network instances. It was also demonstrated that an EA with guided mutation performs better than a conventional genetic algorithm for tuning the control parameters, which indicates that a combination of global statistical information extracted from the previous search and location information of the best solutions found so far could improve the performance of an algorithm.