Adaptive sizing of populations and number of islands in distributed genetic algorithms

  • Authors:
  • Johan Berntsson;Maolin Tang

  • Affiliations:
  • Queensland University of Technology, Australia;Queensland University of Technology, Australia

  • Venue:
  • GECCO '05 Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Deciding the appropriate population size and number of islands for distributed island-model genetic algorithms is often critical to the algorithm's success. This paper outlines a method that automatically searches for good combinations of island population sizes and the number of islands. The method is based on a race between competing parameter sets, and collaborative seeding of new parameter sets. This method is applicable to any problem, and makes distributed genetic algorithms easier to use by reducing the number of user-set parameters. The experimental results show that the proposed method robustly and reliably finds population and islands settings that are comparable to those found with traditional trial-and-error approaches.