Dynamic Evolutionary Algorithm With Variable Relocation

Abstract

Many real-world optimization problems have to be solved under the presence of uncertainties. A significant number of these uncertainty problems falls into the dynamic optimization category in which the fitness function varies through time. For this class of problems, an evolutionary algorithm is expected to perform satisfactorily in spite of different degrees and frequencies of change in the fitness landscape. In addition, the dynamic evolutionary algorithm should warrant an acceptable performance improvement to justify the additional computational cost. Effective reuse of previous evolutionary information is a must as it facilitates a faster convergence after a change has occurred. This paper proposes a new dynamic evolutionary algorithm that uses variable relocation to adapt already converged or currently evolving individuals to the new environmental condition. The proposed algorithm relocates those individuals based on their change in function value due to the change in the environment and the average sensitivities of their decision variables to the corresponding change in the objective space. The relocation occurs during the transient stage of the evolutionary process, and the algorithm reuses as much information as possible from the previous evolutionary history. As a result, the algorithm shows improved adaptation and convergence. The newly adapted population is shown to be fitter to the new environment than the original or most randomly generated population. The algorithm has been tested by several dynamic benchmark problems and has shown competitive results compared to some chosen state-of-the-art dynamic evolutionary approaches.