A non-revisiting Genetic Algorithm

Genetic Algorithm (GA) is a revisiting stochastic algorithm. In other words, a solution that has been visited before may be revisited. The fitness of the solution has to be evaluated each time. Since fitness evaluation is the most computationally intensive process in the execution of the GA, revisits should be minimized or eliminated. In this paper, a novel dynamic binary partitioning tree archive is proposed to eliminate all revisits. It works as follows: When the GA generates a solution, the tree is accessed. A leaf node is appended to the tree if the solution has not been visited before and so has no record in the tree. Otherwise, a search is initiated from the leaf node that is the duplicate to the solution to find the nearest neighbor solution in the search space that is not visited. During this process, whole sub-trees may be pruned if all the leaf nodes it contains are visited. The search naturally implements a self adaptive mutation mechanism. Hence the GA requires no other mutation parameter or mutation scheme. Experimental results reveal that this new GA is superior in performance compared with the standard GA with revisits, and the tree archive is not memory intensive.