Spin-Flip Symmetry and Synchronization

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarissa Van Hoyweghen ◽  
Bart Naudts ◽  
David E. Goldberg

In the context of optimization by evolutionary algorithms (EAs), epistasis, deception, and scaling are well-known examples of problem difficulty characteristics. The presence of one such characteristic in the representation of a search problem indicates a certain type of difficulty the EA is to encounter during its search for globally optimal configurations. In this paper, we claim that the occurrence of symmetry in the representation is another problem difficulty characteristic and discuss one particular form, spin-flip symmetry, characterized by fitness invariant permutations on the alphabet. Its usual effect on unspecialized EAs, premature convergence due to synchronization problems, is discussed in detail. We discuss five different ways to specialize EAs to cope with the symmetry: adapting the genetic operators, changing the fitness function, using a niching technique, using a distributed EA, and attaching a highly redundant genotype-phenotype mapping.

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun He ◽  
Colin Reeves ◽  
Carsten Witt ◽  
Xin Yao

Various methods have been defined to measure the hardness of a fitness function for evolutionary algorithms and other black-box heuristics. Examples include fitness landscape analysis, epistasis, fitness-distance correlations etc., all of which are relatively easy to describe. However, they do not always correctly specify the hardness of the function. Some measures are easy to implement, others are more intuitive and hard to formalize. This paper rigorously defines difficulty measures in black-box optimization and proposes a classification. Different types of realizations of such measures are studied, namely exact and approximate ones. For both types of realizations, it is proven that predictive versions that run in polynomial time in general do not exist unless certain complexity-theoretical assumptions are wrong.


Author(s):  
Shiang-Fong Chen

Abstract The difficulty of an assembly problem is the inherent complexity of possible solutions. If the most suitable plan is selected after all solutions are found, it will be very time consuming and unrealistic. Motivated by the success of genetic algorithms (GAs) in solving combinatorial and complex problems by examining a small number of possible candidate solutions, GAs are employed to find a near-optimal assembly plan for a general environment. Five genetic operators are used: tree crossover, tree mutation, cut-and-paste, break-and-joint, and reproduction. The fitness function can adapt to different criteria easily. This assembly planner can help an inexperienced technician to find a good solution efficiently. The algorithm has been fully implemented. One example product is given to show the applications and results.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xixing Li ◽  
Shunsheng Guo ◽  
Yi Liu ◽  
Baigang Du ◽  
Lei Wang

The mode of production in the modern manufacturing enterprise mainly prefers to MTO (Make-to-Order); how to reasonably arrange the production plan has become a very common and urgent problem for enterprises’ managers to improve inner production reformation in the competitive market environment. In this paper, a mathematical model of production planning is proposed to maximize the profit with capacity constraint. Four kinds of cost factors (material cost, process cost, delay cost, and facility occupy cost) are considered in the proposed model. Different factors not only result in different profit but also result in different satisfaction degrees of customers. Particularly, the delay cost and facility occupy cost cannot reach the minimum at the same time; the two objectives are interactional. This paper presents a mathematical model based on the actual production process of a foundry flow shop. An improved genetic algorithm (IGA) is proposed to solve the biobjective problem of the model. Also, the gene encoding and decoding, the definition of fitness function, and genetic operators have been illustrated. In addition, the proposed algorithm is used to solve the production planning problem of a foundry flow shop in a casting enterprise. And comparisons with other recently published algorithms show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Wenbin Pei ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Lin Shang ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

Abstract High-dimensional unbalanced classification is challenging because of the joint effects of high dimensionality and class imbalance. Genetic programming (GP) has the potential benefits for use in high-dimensional classification due to its built-in capability to select informative features. However, once data is not evenly distributed, GP tends to develop biased classifiers which achieve a high accuracy on the majority class but a low accuracy on the minority class. Unfortunately, the minority class is often at least as important as the majority class. It is of importance to investigate how GP can be effectively utilized for high-dimensional unbalanced classification. In this paper, to address the performance bias issue of GP, a new two-criterion fitness function is developed, which considers two criteria, i.e. the approximation of area under the curve (AUC) and the classification clarity (i.e. how well a program can separate two classes). The obtained values on the two criteria are combined in pairs, instead of summing them together. Furthermore, this paper designs a three-criterion tournament selection to effectively identify and select good programs to be used by genetic operators for generating better offspring during the evolutionary learning process. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better classification performance than other compared methods.


Regression testing is one of the most critical testing activities among software product verification activities. Nevertheless, resources and time constraints could inhibit the execution of a full regression test suite, hence leaving us in confusion on what test cases to run to preserve the high quality of software products. Different techniques can be applied to prioritize test cases in resource-constrained environments, such as manual selection, automated selection, or hybrid approaches. Different Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) have been used in this domain to find an optimal solution to minimize the cost of executing a regression test suite while obtaining maximum fault detection coverage as if the entire test suite was executed. MOEAs achieve this by selecting set of test cases and determining the order of their execution. In this paper, three Multi Objective Evolutionary Algorithms, namely, NSGA-II, IBEA and MoCell are used to solve test case prioritization problems using the fault detection rate and branch coverage of each test case. The paper intends to find out what’s the most effective algorithm to be used in test cases prioritization problems, and which algorithm is the most efficient one, and finally we examined if changing the fitness function would impose a change in results. Our experiment revealed that NSGA-II is the most effective and efficient MOEA; moreover, we found that changing the fitness function caused a significant reduction in evolution time, although it did not affect the coverage metric.


Author(s):  
Ka-Chun Wong

Inspired from nature, evolutionary algorithms have been proven effective and unique in different real world applications. Comparing to traditional algorithms, its parallel search capability and stochastic nature enable it to excel in search performance in a unique way. In this chapter, evolutionary algorithms are reviewed and discussed from concepts and designs to applications in bioinformatics. The history of evolutionary algorithms is first discussed at the beginning. An overview on the state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithm concepts is then provided. Following that, the related design and implementation details are discussed on different aspects: representation, parent selection, reproductive operators, survival selection, and fitness function. At the end of this chapter, real world evolutionary algorithm applications in bioinformatics are reviewed and discussed.


Mathematics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Ugolotti ◽  
Laura Sani ◽  
Stefano Cagnoni

Properly configuring Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) is a challenging task made difficult by many different details that affect EAs’ performance, such as the properties of the fitness function, time and computational constraints, and many others. EAs’ meta-optimization methods, in which a metaheuristic is used to tune the parameters of another (lower-level) metaheuristic which optimizes a given target function, most often rely on the optimization of a single property of the lower-level method. In this paper, we show that by using a multi-objective genetic algorithm to tune an EA, it is possible not only to find good parameter sets considering more objectives at the same time but also to derive generalizable results which can provide guidelines for designing EA-based applications. In particular, we present a general framework for multi-objective meta-optimization, to show that “going multi-objective” allows one to generate configurations that, besides optimally fitting an EA to a given problem, also perform well on previously unseen ones.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document