A family of recombination operators is studied in this work. These operators are based on keeping and using certain information about the past evolution of the algorithm to guide the recombination process. Within this framework, several recombination operators are specifically designed to preserve diversity within the population, while avoiding implicit mutations. The empirical evaluation of these operators on instances of two test problems (k-EMP and permutation flowshop) shows an improvement of the results with respect to other classical operators. This improvement seems to related to the increasing degree of epistasis of the problem.
Carlos Cotta, José M. Troya