Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are search algorithms inspired by genetics and natural selection, and have been used to solve difficult problems in many disciplines, including modelling, control systems and automation. GAs are generally able to find good solutions in reasonable time, however as they are applied to larger and harder problems they are very demanding in terms of computation time and memory.
The Internet is the most powerful parallel and distributed computation environment in the world, and the idle cycles and memories of computers on the Internet have been increasingly recognized as a huge untapped source of computation power. By combining Internet computing and GAs, this dissertation provides a framework for Internet-based parallel and distributed GAs that gives scientists and engineers an easy and affordable way to solve hard real world problems.
Developing parallel computation applications on the Internet is quite unlike developing applications in traditional parallel computation environments, such as multiprocessor systems and clusters. This is because the Internet is different in many respects, such as communication overhead, heterogeneity and volatility. To develop an Internet-based GA, we need to understand the implication of these differences. For this purpose, a convergence model for heterogenous and volatile networks is presented and used in experiments that study GA performance and robustness in Internet-like scenarios. The main outcome of this research is an Internet-based distributed GA framework called G2DGA.
G2DGA is an island model distributed GA, which can provide support for big populations needed to solve many real world problems. G2DGA uses a novel hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) design with island node activity coordinated by supervisor nodes that offer a global overview of the GA search state. Compared to client/server approaches, the P2P architecture improves scalability and fault tolerance by allowing direct communication between the islands and avoiding single-point-of-failure situations.
