Replicating web contents using a hybrid particle swarm optimization

We consider the problem of placing copies of objects in a distributed web server system to minimize the cost of serving read and write requests when the web servers have limited storage capacities. We formulate the problem as a 0–1 optimization problem and present a hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithm to solve it. The proposed hybrid algorithm makes use of the strong global search ability of particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the strong local search ability of tabu search to obtain high quality solutions. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by comparing it with the genetic algorithm (GA), simple PSO, tabu search, and random placement algorithm on a variety of test cases. The simulation results indicate that the proposed hybrid approach outperforms the GA, simple PSO, and tabu search.