Controls and Control Theory Commons^™

Many optimization problems are multi-modal. In certain cases, we are interested in finding multiple locally optimal solutions rather than just a single optimum as is computed by traditional genetic algorithms (GAs). Several niching techniques have been developed that seek to find multiple such local optima. These techniques, which include sharing and crowding, are clearly powerful and useful. But they do not explicitly let the user control the number of local optima being computed, which we believe to be an important capability.

In this paper, we develop a method that provides, as an input parameter to niching, the desired number of …

Traffic to a Web site can vary dramatically. At the same time it is highly desirable that a Web site is reactive. To provide crisp interaction on thin clients, 150 milliseconds has been suggested as an upper bound on response time. Unfortunately, the popular Apache Web server is limited in its capabilities to be reactive under varying traffic. To address this problem, we design in this paper an adaptive controller for the Apache Web server. A modified recursive least squares algorithm is used to identify system dynamics and a minimum degree pole placement controller is implemented to adjust the maximum …