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PEGA: A Privacy-Preserving Genetic Algorithm for Combinatorial Optimization

delete2024-06-01
delete5
PRE
AI
B
Bowen Zhao *
陈伟能 (Wei–Neng Chen) *
魏凤凤 cover
魏凤凤 (Feng-Feng Wei)
X
Ximeng Liu
Q
Qingqi Pei
张军 (Jun Zhang)
DOI:10.1109/TCYB.2023.3346863delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
EA, such as the genetic algorithm (GA), offer an elegant way to handle combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). However, limited by expertise and resources, most users lack the capability to implement evolutionary algorithms (EAs) for solving COPs. An intuitive and promising solution is to outsource evolutionary operations to a cloud server, however, it poses privacy concerns. To this end, this article proposes a novel computing paradigm called evolutionary computation as a service (ECaaS), where a cloud server renders evolutionary computation services for users while ensuring their privacy. Following the concept of ECaaS, this article presents privacy-preserving genetic algorithm (PEGA), a privacy-preserving GA designed specifically for COPs. PEGA enables users, regardless of their domain expertise or resource availability, to outsource COPs to the cloud server that holds a competitive GA and approximates the optimal solution while safeguarding privacy. Notably, PEGA features the following characteristics. First, PEGA empowers users without domain expertise or sufficient resources to solve COPs effectively. Second, PEGA protects the privacy of users by preventing the leakage of optimization problem details. Third, PEGA performs comparably to the conventional GA when approximating the optimal solution. To realize its functionality, we implement PEGA falling in a twin-server architecture and evaluate it on two widely known COPs: 1) the traveling Salesman problem (TSP) and 2) the 0/1 knapsack problem (KP). Particularly, we utilize encryption cryptography to protect users' privacy and carefully design a suite of secure computing protocols to support evolutionary operators of GA on encrypted chromosomes. Privacy analysis demonstrates that PEGA successfully preserves the confidentiality of COP contents. Experimental evaluation results on several TSP datasets and KP datasets reveal that PEGA performs equivalently to the conventional GA in approximating the optimal solution.
Keywords:
Combinatorial optimization
evolutionary computation
ECaaS
privacy protection
secure computing

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics cover
IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
IF:
10.5
Papers:
1.1W
Citations:
5.0W

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Xidian University
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nankai university
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fuzhou university
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south china university of technology
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