Auto-tuning strategy for evolutionary algorithms: balancing between exploration and exploitation

Abstract

Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and other Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), as powerful and broadly applicable stochastic search and optimization techniques have been successfully applied in the area of management science, operations research and industrial engineering. In the past few years, researchers gave lots of great idea for improvement of evolutionary algorithms, which include population initialization, individual selection, evolution, parameter setting, hybrid approach with conventional heuristics etc. However, though lots of different versions of evolutionary computations have been created, all of them have turned most of its attention to the development of search abilities of approaches. In this paper, for improving the search ability, we focus on how to take a balance between exploration and exploitation of the search space. It is also very difficult to solve problem, because the balance between exploration and exploitation is depending on the characteristic of different problems. The balance also should be changed dynamically depend on the status of evolution process. Purpose of this paper is the design of an effective approach which it can correspond to most optimization problems. In this paper, we propose an auto-tuning strategy by using fuzzy logic control. The main idea is adaptively regulation for taking the balance among the stochastic search and local search probabilities based on the change of the average fitness of parents and offspring which is occurred at each generation. In addition, numerical analyses of different type optimization problems show that the proposed approach has higher search capability that improve quality of solution and enhanced rate of convergence.