Phenotypic forking genetic algorithm (p-fGA)

Proposes a new type of multi-population genetic algorithm, the p-fGA (phenotypic forking GA), an extension of the previously proposed g-fGA (genotype forking GA). Both the g-fGA and the p-fGA are designed to solve multi-modal problems which are difficult to solve by traditional GAs. We use multi-population schemes that include one parent population with a blocking mode and one or more child populations with a shrinking mode. The g-fGA defines its sub-space for each population by a “salient schema” within the genotypic search space. In contrast to this, the p-fGA defines its sub-space by a “neighborhood hypercube” around the current best individual in the phenotypic search space. Empirical results show that the p-fGA has a fairly good performance, as does the g-fGA, and the variable-resolution p-fGA has the capability of searching with high resolution and can improve on the local search capability in a genetic search