An Inter-molecular Adaptive Collision Scheme for Chemical Reaction Optimization

Optimization techniques are frequently applied in science and engineering research and development. Evolutionary algorithms, as a kind of general-purpose metaheuristic, have been shown to be very effective in solving a wide range of optimization problems. A recently proposed chemical-reaction-inspired metaheuristic, Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), has been applied to solve many global optimization problems. However, the functionality of the inter-molecular ineffective collision operator in the canonical CRO design overlaps that of the on-wall ineffective collision operator, which can potential impair the overall performance. In this paper we propose a new inter-molecular ineffective collision operator for CRO for global optimization. To fully utilize our newly proposed operator, we also design a scheme to adapt the algorithm to optimization problems with different search space characteristics. We analyze the performance of our proposed algorithm with a number of widely used benchmark functions. The simulation results indicate that the new algorithm has superior performance over the canonical CRO.

Optimal V2G Scheduling of Electric Vehicles and Unit Commitment using Chemical Reaction Optimization

An electric vehicle (EV) may be used as energy storage which allows the bi-directional electricity flow between the vehicle's battery and the electric power grid. In order to flatten the load profile of the electricity system, EV scheduling has become a hot research topic in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new formulation of the joint scheduling of EV and Unit Commitment (UC), called EVUC. Our formulation considers the characteristics of EVs while optimizing the system total running cost. We employ Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), a general-purpose optimization algorithm to solve this problem and the simulation results on a widely used set of instances indicate that CRO can effectively optimize this problem.

Sensor Deployment for Air Pollution Monitoring Using Public Transportation System

Air pollution monitoring is a very popular research topic and many monitoring systems have been developed. In this paper, we formulate the Bus Sensor Deployment Problem (BSDP) to select the bus routes on which sensors are deployed, and we use Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) to solve BSDP. CRO is a recently proposed metaheuristic designed to solve a wide range of optimization problems. Using the real world data, namely Hong Kong Island bus route data, we perform a series of simulations and the results show that CRO is capable of solving this optimization problem efficiently.

Real-Coded Chemical Reaction Optimization with Different Perturbation Functions

Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) is a powerful metaheuristic which mimics the interactions of molecules in chemical reactions to search for the global optimum. The perturbation function greatly influences the performance of CRO on solving different continuous problems. In this paper, we study four different probability distributions, namely, the Gaussian distribution, the Cauchy distribution, the exponential distribution, and a modified Rayleigh distribution, for the perturbation function of CRO. Different distributions have different impacts on the solutions. The distributions are tested by a set of well-known benchmark functions and simulation results show that problems with different characteristics have different preference on the distribution function. Our study gives guidelines to design CRO for different types of optimization problems.

Evolutionary Artificial Neural Network Based on Chemical Reaction Optimization

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are very popular tools to design and evolve artificial neural networks (ANNs), especially to train them. These methods have advantages over the conventional backpropagation (BP) method because of their low computational requirement when searching in a large solution space. In this paper, we employ Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), a newly developed global optimization method, to replace BP in training neural networks. CRO is a population-based metaheuristics mimicking the transition of molecules and their interactions in a chemical reaction. Simulation results show that CRO outperforms many EA strategies commonly used to train neural networks.