GRASP and grid computing to solve the location area problem

In this paper we present a new approach based on the GRASP (Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure) metaheuristic to solve the Location Area (LA) problem over a grid computing environment. All the experiments carried out to complete this study were executed in a real grid environment provided by a virtual organization of the European project EGEE. These experiments were divided into sequential and parallel executions with the intention of analyzing the behavior of the different variants of GRASP when applied to the LA problem. We have used four distinct test networks and also decided to compare the results obtained by this new approach with those achieved through other algorithms from our previous work and also by other authors. The experimental results show that this GRASP based approach is very encouraging because, with the grid computing, the execution time is much more reduced and the results obtained are very similar to those of other techniques proposed in the literature.