Niching Method for Combinatorial Optimization Problems and Application to JSP

Niching ethods are useful extension of evolutionary algorithm that can permit population to search many peaks in parallel in multimodal domains. Traditional niching methods that can effectively be used to solve function optimization problems (FOPs) are not suitable for solving combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). We propose a new genetic algorithm (GA) for forming niches that can be efficiently applied to COPs. For this, we propose four requirements that are needed for an ideal method of forming niches for COPs. We then discuss a niching method we designed that satisfies these requirements. The proposed GA was applied to job shop scheduling problems (JSP) to demonstrate its effectiveness.