Local search operators in fast evolutionary programming

Previous studies have shown that embedding local search in classical evolutionary programming (EP) could lead to improved performance on function optimization problems. The utility of local search is investigated with fast evolutionary programming (FEP) and comparisons are offered between performance improvements obtained when using local search with Gaussian and Cauchy mutations. Experiments were conducted on a suite of four well known function optimization problems using two local search methods (conjugate gradient and F.J. Solis and R.J.-B. Wets, (1981)) with varying amounts of local search being incorporated into the evolutionary algorithm. Empirical results indicate that FEP with the conjugate gradient method outperforms other hybrid methods on three of the four functions when evolution was conducted for a fixed number of generations. Trials using local search produced solutions that were statistically as good as or better than trials without local search. However, the cost of using local search justified the enhancement in solution quality only when using Gaussian mutations but not when using Cauchy mutations