A splicing/decomposable encoding and its novel operators for genetic algorithms

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new genetic representation - a splicing/decomposable (S/D) binary encoding, which was proposed based on some theoretical guidance and existing recommendations for designing efficient genetic representations. Our theoretical and empirical investigations reveal that the S/D binary representation is more proper than other existing binary encodings for searching of genetic algorithms (GAs). Moreover, we define a new genotypic distance on the S/D binary space, which is equivalent to the Euclidean distance on the real-valued space during GAs convergence. Based on the new genotypic distance, GAs can reliably and predictably solve problems of bounded complexity and the methods depended on the Euclidean distance for solving different kinds of optimization problems can be directly used on the S/D binary space. Copyright 2006 ACM.