Hybrid artificial bee colony algorithm based approaches for two ring loading problems

Abstract

This paper presents hybrid artificial bee colony algorithm based approaches for two NP-hard problems arising in optical ring networks. These two problems falls under the category of ring loading problems. Given a set of data transfer demands between different pair of nodes, the first problem consists in routing the demands on the ring in either clockwise or counter-clockwise directions so that the maximum data transmitted through any link in either directions is minimized. The second problem, on the other hand, discriminates between the data transmitted in one direction from the other and consists in minimizing the maximum data transmitted in one particular direction through any link. The first problem is referred to as weighted ring edge-loading problem in the literature, whereas the latter as weighted ring arc-loading problem. Computational results on the standard benchmark instances show the effectiveness of our approaches on both the problems.