A Variable Neighborhood Search Algorithm for Heat Pipe-Constrained Component Layout Optimization

This paper proposes a bi-level Multi-Start Variable Neighborhood Search-Genetic Algorithm (MSVNS-GA) for the heat pipe-constrained component layout optimization (HCLO) problems. The proposed algorithm has won the first place in the CEC’2022 Competition on the Heat Pipe-Constrained Component Layout Optimization. First, the HCLO problem is divided into two sub-problems, heat pipe assignment (HA) and component location (CL). In the HA problem, components are assigned to different heat pipes. The best assignment scheme is taken as the input of the CL problem. In the CL problem, the specific coordinates of components are determined to meet practical engineering constraints. In this way, the complexity of the problem is lowered, and a part of the infeasible solution is cropped. Second, to address the HA problem, a multi-start variable neighborhood search algorithm is proposed and five efficient bottleneck-aware neighborhood structures are designed. And the genetic algorithm is used for CL problem. Finally, 30 independent experiments are carried out on the calculation examples with sizes of 6×4, 15×6, 40×16, and 90×32. The best result obtained by MSVNS-GA is 0.0%, 1.0%, 0.8%, and 1.1% different from the estimated lower bounds.