A comparative study of swarm intelligence and evolutionary algorithms on urban land readjustment problem

Abstract

Abstract Land Readjustment and redistribution (LR) is a land management tool that helps regular urban development with the contribution of landowners. The main purpose of LR is to transform irregularly developed land parcels into suitable forms. Since it is necessary to handle many criteria simultaneously to solve LR problems, classical mathematical methods can be insufficient due to time limitation. Since LR problems are similar to traveling salesman problems and typical scheduling problems in terms of structure, they are kinds of NP-hard problems in combinatorial optimization. Therefore, metaheuristic algorithms are used in order to solve NP-hard problems instead of classical methods. At first, in this study, an effective problem-specific objective function is proposed to address the main criteria of the problem. In addition, a map-based crossover operator and three different mutation operators are proposed for the LR, and then a hybrid approach is implemented by utilizing those operators together. Furthermore, since the optimal value of the problem handled in real world cannot be exactly estimated, a synthetic dataset is proposed as a benchmarking set in LR which makes the success of algorithms can be objectively evaluated. This dataset consists of 5 different problems according to number of parcel which are 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100. Each problem set consists of 4 sub-problems in terms of number of landowners per-parcel which are 1, 2, 3 and 4. Therefore, the dataset consists of 20 kinds of problems. In this study, artificial bee colony, particle swarm optimization, differential evolution, genetic and tree seed algorithm are used. In the experimental studies, five algorithms are set to run under equal conditions using the proposed synthetic dataset. When the acquired experimental results are examined, genetic algorithm seems to be the most effective algorithm in terms of both speed and performance. Although artificial bee colony has better results from genetic algorithm in a few problems, artificial bee colony is the second most successful algorithm after genetic algorithm in terms of performance. However, in terms of time, artificial bee colony is an algorithm nearly as successful as genetic algorithm. On the other hand, the results of differential evolution, particle swarm optimization and tree seed algorithms are similar to each other in terms of solution quality. In conclusion, the statistical tests clearly show that genetic algorithm is the most effective technique in solving LR problems in terms of speed, performance and robustness.