An evolutionary programming algorithm for continuous global optimization

Evolutionary computations are very effective at performing global search (in probability), however, the speed of convergence could be slow. This paper presents an evolutionary programming algorithm combined with macro-mutation (MM), local linear bisection search (LBS) and crossover operators for global optimisation. The MM operator is designed to explore the whole search space and the LBS operator to exploit the neighbourhood of the solution. Simulated annealing is adopted to prevent premature convergence. The performance of the proposed algorithm is assessed by numerical experiments on 12 benchmark problems. Combined with MM, the effectiveness of various local search operators is also studied.