A Distributed Genetic Algorithm with Adaptive Diversity Maintenance for Ordered Problems

Abstract

Maintaining population diversity is critical to the performance of a Genetic Algorithm (GA). Applying appropriate strategies for measuring population diversity is important in order to ensure that the mechanisms for controlling population diversity are provided with accurate feedback. Sequence-wise approaches to measuring population diversity have demonstrated their effectiveness in assisting with maintaining population diversity for ordered problems, however these processes increase the computational costs for solving ordered problems. Research in distributed GAs have demonstrated how applying different distribution models can affect an GA's ability to scale and effectively search the solution space. This paper proposes a distributed GA with adaptive parameter controls for solving ordered problems such as the travelling salesman problem(TSP), capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) and the job-shop scheduling problem (JSSP). Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach.