Disburdening the species conservation evolutionary algorithm of arguing with radii

Stoean C., Preuss M., Stoean R., Dumitrescu D.

Abstract
The present paper investigates the hybridization of two well-known multimodal optimization methods, i.e. species conservation and multinational algorithms. The topological species conservation algorithm embraces the vision of the existence of subpopulations around seeds (the best local individuals) and the preservation of these dominating individuals from one generation to another, but detects multimodality by means of the hill-valley mechanism employed by multinational algorithms. The aim is to inherit the strengths of both parent techniques and at the same time overcome their flaws. The species conservation algorithm efficiently keeps track of several good search space regions at once, but is difficult to parametrize without prior problem knowledge. Conversely, the multinational algorithms use many functionevaluations to establish subpopulations, but do not depend onprovided radius parameter values. Experiments with all threealgorithms are made on a wide range of test problems in order toinvestigate their advantages and shortcomings. Copyright 2007 ACM.

Keywords
Detect-multimodal mechanism; Hybridization; Multimodal evolutionary algorithms; Species conservation