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Dynamic populations in genetic algorithms

Published: 16 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Biological populations are dynamic in both space and time, that is, the population size of a species fluctuates across their habitats over time. There are rarely any static or fixed size populations in nature. In evolutionary computation (EC), population size is one of the most important parameters and it received attention from EC pioneers from the very beginning. Despite many attempts to optimize the population sizing, the prevailing scheme in EC is still possibly the simplest --- the fixed size population. This is in strong contrast with population entities in nature. In this paper, we explore the effects of dynamic (fluctuating) populations on the performance of genetic algorithms (GA). In particular, we test five dynamic population-sizing patterns: random fluctuating population, increasing population, decreasing population, bell-shaped population, and inverse bell-shaped population and compare them against the fixed size population. Our experiment shows very promising results that the dynamic populations perform more efficiently than the traditional fixed size populations, in terms of the number of fitness function evaluations and memory space requirements. We also analyze why the dynamic populations should perform superior to the fixed size populations from the biological perspective.

References

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DeJung, K. A. 1975. An analysis of the behaviors of genetic adaptive systems. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Michigan, MI.
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Eiben, A. E. & J. E. Smith 2003. Introduction to Evolutionary Computing. Springer.
[3]
Goldberg, D. E. 1989. Sizing populations for serial and parallel genetic algorithms. in "Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Genetic Algorithms", ed. by David Schaffer. Morgan Kaufman Publishers, pp.70--79.
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Goldberg, D. E. et al. 1992. Genetic algorithms, Noise, and the Sizing of Populations. Complex Systems, 6:333--362.
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Harik, G., E. Canx-Paz, D. E. Goldberg, and B. L. Miller. 1999. The Gambler's ruin problem, genetic algorithms, and the sizing of populations. Evol. Comput., vol. 7(3):231--253.
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Holland, J. H. 1975. Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems. University of Michigan Press.
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Wolpert, D. H. and W. G. Macready. 1997. No free lunch theorems for optimization. IEEE Trans. Evol. Comp. 1(1):67--82

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  • (2024)A survey on dynamic populations in bio-inspired algorithmsGenetic Programming and Evolvable Machines10.1007/s10710-024-09492-425:2Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
  • (2017)Diversity-based adaptive genetic algorithm for a Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problem2017 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)10.1109/CEC.2017.7969516(1771-1778)Online publication date: Jun-2017
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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing
March 2008
2586 pages
ISBN:9781595937537
DOI:10.1145/1363686
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 March 2008

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Author Tags

  1. dynamic population
  2. ecological computation
  3. evolutionary computation
  4. fluctuating population
  5. genetic algorithms

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SAC '08
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SAC '08: The 2008 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
March 16 - 20, 2008
Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
March 31 - April 4, 2025
Catania , Italy

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Location, Size, and CapacityInto a Deeper Understanding of Evolutionary Computing: Exploration, Exploitation, and Parameter Control10.1007/978-3-031-75577-4_1(1-152)Online publication date: 18-Jan-2025
  • (2024)A survey on dynamic populations in bio-inspired algorithmsGenetic Programming and Evolvable Machines10.1007/s10710-024-09492-425:2Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
  • (2017)Diversity-based adaptive genetic algorithm for a Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problem2017 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)10.1109/CEC.2017.7969516(1771-1778)Online publication date: Jun-2017
  • (2016)A Lightweight Social Computing Approach to Emergency Management Policy SelectionIEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems10.1109/TSMC.2015.248428146:8(1075-1087)Online publication date: Aug-2016
  • (2015)Towards computational models of animal communications, an introduction for computer scientistsCognitive Systems Research10.1016/j.cogsys.2014.08.00233:C(70-99)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2015
  • (2015)Towards computational models of animal cognition, an introduction for computer scientistsCognitive Systems Research10.1016/j.cogsys.2014.08.00133:C(42-69)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2015
  • (2011)Dynamic Hybrid Fault Modeling and Extended Evolutionary Game Theory for Reliability, Survivability and Fault Tolerance AnalysesIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2011.210499760:1(180-196)Online publication date: Mar-2011
  • (2009)Towards an Extended Evolutionary Game Theory with Survival Analysis and Agreement Algorithms for Modeling Uncertainty, Vulnerability, and DeceptionProceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computational Intelligence10.1007/978-3-642-05253-8_67(608-618)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2009
  • (2009)Towards a Population Dynamics Theory for Evolutionary ComputingProceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computational Intelligence10.1007/978-3-642-05253-8_22(195-205)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2009

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