An object-oriented toolkit for evolutionary algorithms

Describes the design of a toolkit for implementing evolutionary algorithms which use a simplified model of natural evolution as their core problem-solving technique. Our goal is to identify high-level concepts required to describe a wide range of such algorithms and implement these concepts as an extensible collection of interoperable components. This collection will allow both researchers and practitioners to rapidly create a wide variety of task-specific evolutionary algorithms. Instead of directly coding these algorithms in a programming language, toolkit users can define them by assembling a graph, whose nodes are selected from a pre-defined set of transformations. By using object-oriented techniques, we allow for easy customization or definition of new toolkit components