Metaheuristics for reliable server assignment problems

Abstract

Previous studies of reliable server assignment considered only to assign the same cost of server, that is, homogeneous servers. In this paper, we generally deal with reliable server assignment with different server costs, i.e., heterogeneous servers. We formulate this problem as a nonlinear integer programming mathematically. Our problem is defined as determining a deployment of heterogeneous servers to maximize a measure of service availability. We propose two metaheuristic algorithms (tabu search and particle swarm optimization) for solving the problem of reliable server assignment. From the computational results, we notice that our tabu search outstandingly outperforms particle swarm optimization for all test problems. In terms of solution quality and computing time, the proposed method is recommended as a promising metaheuristic for a kind of reliability optimization problems including reliable sever assignment and e-Navigation system.