Optimizations and Placement with the Genetic Workbench
S. Turrini · 1999
The Genetic Workbench (GWB) is a software system built with the intent of investigating evolutionary or non-standard algorithms applied to difficult combinatorial problems. The user is allowed to experiment with various techniques, operators, parameters, strategies and compare the results. In particular the optimal placements of connected components or modules on a plane has been considered, but some of the strategies implemented in the GWB can be applied to other permutation based problems as well. Techniques which generate the best results have also been compared with one of the best commercial tools available, TimberWolf ver. 7, which uses a special simulated annealing algorithm, to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the different methods. Most of the strategies used in the GWB can be classified as evolutionary or rely on some implementation of a genetic algorithm; this is the reason why the qualifier genetic has been used to name the system. For the placement problem in particular, results of running standard benchmarks are also shown at the end of this report.