Analysis of Some Mating and Collaboration Strategies in Evolutionary Algorithms

The selection of mates in an evolutionary algorithm can significantly influence the exploration and the exploitation abilities of the search process. Currently there are several strategies to guide the mate selection or to restrict the mating pool. The aim of this paper is to analyze the behavior of a fitness guided mate selection strategy and of a collaboration strategy between population elements which use different mating rules. The behavior is analyzed empirically for mate selection in Differential Evolution algorithms by considering that the population is divided in two subpopulations characterized by different mating rules. The dynamics of these subpopulations sizes is also theoretically analyzed.