History dynamics of unified empire in China(770 BC to 476 BC)

The laws and regulations in human history can be revealed by computational models.From 221 before Christ(BC)to 1912 Anno Domini(AD),the unification pattern has dominated the main part of Chinese history for 2132 years.Before the emergence of the first unified empire,the Qin Empire in 221 BC,there existed the Eastern Zhou dynasty(770 BC to 221 BC).This long dynasty has two stages,and here we focus on the first stage.This Spring-Autumn stage was from 770 BC(with 148 states)to 476 BC(with 32 states).The whole country(China)is modelled as a multi‐agent system,which contains multiple local states.They behave autonomously under certain action rules(wars and conflicts),which forms the main reason for the annexations and disappearance of most states.Key factors(power,loyalty,bellicosity and alliance)have been considered in our model settings,and simulation outcomes will be monitored and collected.Eventually,an optimal solution is obtained,which well unveils the internal mechanism and statistical features of real big history.Furthermore,counterfactuals are used to explore the non‐linear effects of the key factors,which deepens the authors’understanding of civilisa-tion evolutions in human history.

A Memetic Algorithm With Competition for the Capacitated Green Vehicle Routing Problem

In this paper, a memetic algorithm with competition(MAC) is proposed to solve the capacitated green vehicle routing problem(CGVRP). Firstly, the permutation array called traveling salesman problem(TSP) route is used to encode the solution, and an effective decoding method to construct the CGVRP route is presented accordingly. Secondly, the k-nearest neighbor(k NN) based initialization is presented to take use of the location information of the customers. Thirdly, according to the characteristics of the CGVRP, the search operators in the variable neighborhood search(VNS) framework and the simulated annealing(SA) strategy are executed on the TSP route for all solutions. Moreover, the customer adjustment operator and the alternative fuel station(AFS) adjustment operator on the CGVRP route are executed for the elite solutions after competition. In addition, the crossover operator is employed to share information among different solutions. The effect of parameter setting is investigated using the Taguchi method of design-ofexperiment to suggest suitable values. Via numerical tests, it demonstrates the effectiveness of both the competitive search and the decoding method. Moreover, extensive comparative results show that the proposed algorithm is more effective and efficient than the existing methods in solving the CGVRP.