A brief review of penalty methods in genetic algorithms for optimization

Penalty technique perhaps is the most common technique used in the genetic algorithms for constrained optimization problems. In recent years, several techniques have been proposed in the area of evolutionary computation. However, there is no general guideline on designing penalty function and constructing an efficient penalty function is quite problem-dependent. The purpose of the paper is to give a tutorial survey of recent works on penalty techniques used in genetic algorithms and to give a better classification on exisitng works, which may be helpful for revealing the intrinsic relationship among them and for providing some hints for further studies on penalty techniques.