ASPARAGOS - A PARALLEL GENETIC ALGORITHM AND POPULATION-GENETICS

ASPARAGOS is an implementation of an asynchronous parallel genetic algorithm. It simulates a continous population structure. Instead of modeling one large population ASPARAGOS introduces a continuous population structure. Individuals behave independent and due to the limited distance an individual may move, there are only local interactions. We get an algorithm which is very robust in parameter setting and which may deal with much smaller population sizes than needed with only one large population to overcome the problem of preconvergence. These results have been derived with the traveling salesman problem as testbed. The high quality solutions yielded show the effectiveness of ASPARAGOS especially with large problem sizes and give hope that it may serve as a general purpose optimization algorithm suitable for a wide range of applications.