The hierarchical fair competition (HFC) model for parallel evolutionary algorithms

The HFC model for evolutionary computation is inspired by the stratified competition often seen in society and biology. Subpopulations are stratified by fitness. Individuals move from low-fitness subpopulations to higher-fitness subpopulations if and only if they exceed the fitness-based admission threshold of the receiving subpopulation, but not of a higher one. HFC´s balanced exploration and exploitation, while avoiding premature convergence, is shown on a genetic programming example