Title
DE-Path: A Differential-Evolution-Based Method for Computing Energy-Minimizing Paths on Surfaces
Abstract
Computing energy-minimizing paths that are general for different energy forms is a common task in science and engineering. Conventional methods adopt numerical solvers, such as conjugate gradient or quasi-Newton. While these are efficient, the results are highly sensitive with respect to the initial paths. In this paper we develop a method based on differential evolution (DE) for computing optimal solutions. We propose a simple strategy to encode paths and define path operations, such as addition and scalar multiplication, so that the discrete paths can fit into the DE framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three applications: (1) computing discrete geodesic paths on surfaces with non-uniform density function; (2) finding a smooth path that follows a given vector field as much as possible; and (3) finding a curve on a terrain with (near-) constant slope.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1016/j.cad.2019.05.025
Computer-Aided Design
Keywords
Field
DocType
Energy-minimizing paths,Differential evolution,Global solver
Conjugate gradient method,Applied mathematics,ENCODE,Mathematical optimization,Scalar multiplication,Vector field,Terrain,Differential evolution,Probability density function,Mathematics,Geodesic
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
114
0010-4485
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zipeng Ye121.36
Yong-Jin Liu283772.83
jianmin zheng3102499.03
Kai Hormann4184.35
Ying He51264105.35