Abstract
The floorplan design problem is a combinatorial optimization problem, and it is difficult to find an exactly optimal solution in practical applications. A variety of genetic algorithms for floorplan design have been reported in the literature, however in most of these algorithms, some kind of floorplans can not be represented by means of chromosomes, and consequently, we can never obtain such kind of floorplans using these algorithms. In this paper, a new genetic algorithm for floorplan design is proposed. First, the problem is formulated as a rectangle-packing problem, and a “sequence-pair” is used for genotype coding in order to represent any possible floorplan. Next, properties of process of decoding from sequence-pair to floorplan are investigated in detail, and two guidelines to inherit the “local floorplan” can be derived from them. On the basis of these guidelines a new crossover operator can be designed for sequence-pair, and a new genetic algorithm can be constructed. Moreover, our algorithm is implemented and applied to a MCNC benchmark, and it is shown that each of the two guidelines is effective and that the resultt obtained by our algorithm is better than that by the existing algorithm.
