Genetic Algorithms and Book Embeddings: A Dual Layered Approach
Shannon Overbay Paul De Palma Marshall Hurson Tiffany Arnold Andrew Pierce Gonzaga University Spokane, WA 99258 USA [email protected]
Abstract spine) along with an assignment of each edge to a The genetic algorithm (GA) has been applied single half-plane extruding from the spine (a page) to a wide variety of problems where truly such that the edges do not cross each other or the optimal solutions are computationally spine. The goal is to find the minimal number of intractable. One such problem is the book pages needed to embed a given graph in a book. The embedding problem from graph theory. A study of book embedding is of interest both as a book embedding is an ordering of vertices theoretical area of topological graph theory and as a along a line (the spine) with the edges practical subject with numerous applications. embedded in half-planes (the pages) extruding from the line so that the edges do not cross. There has been a recent boom in interest in book The goal is to find the minimal number of half- planes needed to embed a given graph. This embedding, motivated by its usage in modeling a problem is known to be NP-complete. The variety of problems. Book embeddings have been paper shows that the GA can be used to applied to fault-tolerant VLSI design, sorting with generate counter-examples to conjectured parallel stacks, single-row routing, and complexity minimum bounds. theory (Chung, Leighton, and Rosenberg, 1987). Beyond computer science applications, book embeddings can be used to model and solve traffic Introduction flow problems (Kainen, 1990) and to study RNA folding (Gliess and Stadler, 1999). Due to its The idea that there might be something to be gained contributions to both theory and application, book by applying the principles of Darwinian natural embedding has been the subject of extensive study. selection to computing is not new. Turing himself Dujmovi ć and Wood (2004) give a summary of many proposed evolutionary search as early as 1948. of the known applications and results in book Though John Holland at the University of Michigan embeddings. coined the term “genetic algorithm” in the mid- seventies, the GA was not widely studied until 1989 The book embedding problem is also known to be when D.E. Goldberg showed that it could be used to NP-complete (Garey, et al., 1980). Informally, this solve a number of difficult problems (Holland, 1975; means that an exhaustive search through the space of Goldberg, 1989; Luger and Stubblefield, 2009). At possible embeddings for a minimal embedding is least some of those difficult problems are in the intractable. As an NP-complete problem, the task of equivalence class “consisting of the ‘hardest’ determining an optimal book embedding for an problems in NP,” namely the class of NP-complete arbitrary graph is difficult. This is where methods problems (Garey and Johnson, 1979: 14). such as the GA may be of great assistance. The Researchers who investigate problems in this class contribution of the GA to the book embedding must content themselves with heuristic approaches, problem is two-fold: 1) generating novel embeddings constraint relaxation, and, crucially, with sub-optimal and 2) generating counter-examples to conjectured solutions. bounds. In this paper, we provide an overview of book embedding, an overview of the GA, and present This paper argues that the GA can be effectively used very encouraging results for graphs of various in a problem from graph theory known as book configurations. We also describe a novel technique embedding. A book embedding of a graph is an that we call the “Dual-Layered Approach” (DUA) ordering of the vertices along a line in 3-space (the which we are currently investigating. The Book Embedding Problem still ( − 1)!/2 vertex orderings to consider. Once the vertex order is determined, then the edges must An n-book is a topological structure consisting of n be embedded on the pages of the book. As the half-planes (the pages) joined together at a common numbers of vertices and edges increase, finding the line (the spine). A graph is embedded in a book by book-thickness of a graph becomes computationally placing the vertices along the spine and each edge on intractable. Garey, Johnson, Miller, and a single page of the book so that no two edges cross Papadimitriou (1980) proved that the problem of on any page. The book-thickness of a graph G, determining the book-thickness of an arbitrary graph is NP-complete, even with a pre-specified vertex denoted ( ), is the smallest number n for which G has an n-book embedding. ordering.
Despite the difficulty of the general book embedding problem, there are known bounds for the book- thickness of a graph with m vertices and q edges. We include Bernhart and Kainen’s (1979) proof here since we use methods from this proof to form our custom cost function for our book embedding GA.
Theorem 1 ℎ ℎ ≥ 4 , ℎ