Planned tournament selection

Tournament selection is a versatile method of selection and replacement used in evolutionary computation. Normally tournaments are chosen uniformly at random. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of planning tournaments in advance to control information flow within a population being evolved for optimization. Tests are performed on a variety of evolutionary test problems, finding that different planned tournament schemes yield significant differences in performance. The correct type of planned tournament is found to be problem dependent. In addition to a linear‐function scheme for planning tournaments, this study also introduces a technique called multi‐deme planned tournaments selection which permits simpler cases of a problem to be automatically used to reduce the time required to solve more complex cases.