Simulation optimization embedded particle swarm optimization for Reliable Server Assignment

A reliable server assignment (RSA) problem in networks is defined as determining a deployment of identical servers to maximize a measure of service availability. In networks, the communication between a client and a server might be interrupted since the server itself is offline or unreachable as a result of catastrophic network failures. In this paper, a novel simulation optimization approach is developed based on a Monte Carlo (MC) simulation and embedded into Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to solve the RSA problem. The experimental results show that the simulation optimization embedded PSO is an effective heuristic method.