Multimodal Optimization Based on Global and Local Mutation Operators

Multimodal optimization is one of the most interesting topics in evolutionary computational discipline. Simple genetic algorithm, a basic and good-performance genetic algorithm, shows bad performance on multimodal problems, taking long generation time to obtain the optimum, converging on the local extrema in early generation. In this paper, we propose a new genetic algorithm with two new genetic mutational operators, i.e. global and local mutation operators, and no genetic crossover. The proposed algorithm is similar to Simple GA and the two genetic operators are as simple as the conventional mutation. They just mutate the genes from left or right end of a chromosome till the randomly selected gene is replaced. In fact, two operators are identical with each other except for the direction where they are applied. Their roles of shaking the population (global searching) and fine tuning (local searching) make the diversity of the individuals being maintained through the entire generation. The proposed algorithm is, therefore, robust and powerful.