A Distributed Genetic Algorithm with Migration for the Design of Composite Laminate Structures

McMahon, Mathew T and Watson, Layne T (1998) A Distributed Genetic Algorithm with Migration for the Design of Composite Laminate Structures. Technical Report ncstrl.vatech_cs//TR-98-20, Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a general Fortran 90 framework for the solution of composite laminate design problems using a genetic algorithm (GA). The initial Fortran 90 module and package of operators result in a standard genetic algorithm (sGA). The sGA is extended to operate on a parallel processor, and a migration algorithm is introduced. These extensions result in the distributed genetic algorithm with migration (dGA). The performance of the dGA in terms of cost and reliability is studied and compared to a sGA baseline, using two types of composite laminate design problems. The nondeterminism of GAs and the migration and dynamic load balancing algorithm used in this work result in a changed (diminished) workload, so conventional measures of parallelizability are not meaningful. Thus, a set of experiments is devised to characterize the run time performance of the dGA.