Advances In Evolutionary Algorithms

Genetic and evolutionary algorithms (GEAs) have often achieved an enviable success in solving optimization problems in a wide range of disciplines. This book provides effective optimization algorithms for solving a broad class of problems quickly, accurately, and reliably by employing evolutionary mechanisms.

This book provides a collection of fourty articles containing new material on both theoretical aspects of Evolutionary Computing (EC), and demonstrating the usefulness/success of it for various kinds of large-scale real world problems. Around 23 articles deal with various theoretical aspects of EC and 17 articles demonstrate the success of EC methodologies. These articles are written by leading experts of the field from different countries all over the world.

Evolutionary algorithms are becoming increasingly attractive across various disciplines, such as operations research, computer science, industrial engineering, electrical engineering, social science and economics. Introduction to Evolutionary Algorithms presents an insightful, comprehensive, and up-to-date treatment of evolutionary algorithms. It covers such hot topics as: • genetic algorithms, • differential evolution, • swarm intelligence, and • artificial immune systems. The reader is introduced to a range of applications, as Introduction to Evolutionary Algorithms demonstrates how to model real world problems, how to encode and decode individuals, and how to design effective search operators according to the chromosome structures with examples of constraint optimization, multiobjective optimization, combinatorial optimization, and supervised/unsupervised learning. This emphasis on practical applications will benefit all students, whether they choose to continue their academic career or to enter a particular industry. Introduction to Evolutionary Algorithms is intended as a textbook or self-study material for both advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Additional features such as recommended further reading and ideas for research projects combine to form an accessible and interesting pedagogical approach to this widely used discipline.

This book covers the most recent advances in the field of evolutionary multiobjective optimization. With the aim of drawing the attention of up-and coming scientists towards exciting prospects at the forefront of computational intelligence, the authors have made an effort to ensure that the ideas conveyed herein are accessible to the widest audience. The book begins with a summary of the basic concepts in multi-objective optimization. This is followed by brief discussions on various algorithms that have been proposed over the years for solving such problems, ranging from classical (mathematical) approaches to sophisticated evolutionary ones that are capable of seamlessly tackling practical challenges such as non-convexity, multi-modality, the presence of multiple constraints, etc. Thereafter, some of the key emerging aspects that are likely to shape future research directions in the field are presented. These include: optimization in dynamic environments, multi-objective bilevel programming, handling high dimensionality under many objectives, and evolutionary multitasking. In addition to theory and methodology, this book describes several real-world applications from various domains, which will expose the readers to the versatility of evolutionary multi-objective optimization.

Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) are a set of algorithms in the Evolutionary Computation (EC) field characterized by the use of explicit probability distributions in optimization. Contrarily to other EC techniques such as the broadly known Genetic Algorithms (GAs) in EDAs, the crossover and mutation operators are substituted by the sampling of a distribution previously learnt from the selected individuals. EDAs have experienced a high development that has transformed them into an established discipline within the EC field. This book attracts the interest of new researchers in the EC field as well as in other optimization disciplines, and that it becomes a reference for all of us working on this topic. The twelve chapters of this book can be divided into those that endeavor to set a sound theoretical basis for EDAs, those that broaden the methodology of EDAs and finally those that have an applied objective.

This timely review volume summarizes the state-of-the-art developments in nature-inspired algorithms and applications with the emphasis on swarm intelligence and bio-inspired computation. Topics include the analysis and overview of swarm intelligence and evolutionary computation, hybrid metaheuristic algorithms, bat algorithm, discrete cuckoo search, firefly algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and harmony search as well as convergent hybridization. Application case studies have focused on the dehydration of fruits and vegetables by the firefly algorithm and goal programming, feature selection by the binary flower pollination algorithm, job shop scheduling, single row facility layout optimization, training of feed-forward neural networks, damage and stiffness identification, synthesis of cross-ambiguity functions by the bat algorithm, web document clustering, truss analysis, water distribution networks, sustainable building designs and others. As a timely review, this book can serve as an ideal reference for graduates, lecturers, engineers and researchers in computer science, evolutionary computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational intelligence, data mining, engineering optimization and designs.

Many machine learning tasks involve solving complex optimization problems, such as working on non-differentiable, non-continuous, and non-unique objective functions; in some cases it can prove difficult to even define an explicit objective function. Evolutionary learning applies evolutionary algorithms to address optimization problems in machine learning, and has yielded encouraging outcomes in many applications. However, due to the heuristic nature of evolutionary optimization, most outcomes to date have been empirical and lack theoretical support. This shortcoming has kept evolutionary learning from being well received in the machine learning community, which favors solid theoretical approaches. Recently there have been considerable efforts to address this issue. This book presents a range of those efforts, divided into four parts. Part I briefly introduces readers to evolutionary learning and provides some preliminaries, while Part II presents general theoretical tools for the analysis of running time and approximation performance in evolutionary algorithms. Based on these general tools, Part III presents a number of theoretical findings on major factors in evolutionary optimization, such as recombination, representation, inaccurate fitness evaluation, and population. In closing, Part IV addresses the development of evolutionary learning algorithms with provable theoretical guarantees for several representative tasks, in which evolutionary learning offers excellent performance.

The first complete overview of evolutionary computing, the collective name for a range of problem-solving techniques based on principles of biological evolution, such as natural selection and genetic inheritance. The text is aimed directly at lecturers and graduate and undergraduate students. It is also meant for those who wish to apply evolutionary computing to a particular problem or within a given application area. The book contains quick-reference information on the current state-of-the-art in a wide range of related topics, so it is of interest not just to evolutionary computing specialists but to researchers working in other fields.