Cooperative Co-evolution with Weighted Random Grouping for Large-Scale Crossing Waypoints Locating in Air Route Network

The large-scale Crossing Waypoints Location Problem (CWLP) is a crucial problem in the design of Air Route Network (ARN). CWLP is fully non-separable and non-differentiable, and thus traditional algorithms can hardly deal with it. This paper proposes an algorithm named Cooperative Co-evolution with Weighted Random Grouping (CCWR) to tackle it. CCWR employs the weighted random (WR) grouping strategy, which is specifically designed for CWLP, to divide the large-scale Crossing Waypoints (CWs) into small sub-groups and an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) to solve the smaller scale CWs location problem in each sub-group. Experiments on the database of the ARN in China have been carried out to evaluate the performance of CCWR. The results showed that CCWR is superior to a number of state-of-the-art algorithms, and the advanced performance of CCWR is mainly due to the WR grouping strategy.