Analysis of adaptive operator selection techniques on the royal road and long k-path problems

Abstract

One of the choices that most affect the performance of Evolutionary Algorithms is the selection of the variation operators that are efficient to solve the problem at hand. This work presents an empirical analysis of different Adaptive Operator Selection (AOS) methods, i.e., techniques that automatically select the operator to be applied among the available ones, while searching for the solution. Four previously published operator selection rules are combined to four different credit assignment mechanisms. These 16 AOS combinations are analyzed and compared in the light of two well-known benchmark problems in Evolutionary Computation, the Royal Road and the Long K-Path.