A robust adaptive hybrid genetic simulated annealing algorithm for the global optimization of multimodal functions

In this paper we presented a novel hybrid genetic algorithm for solving NLP problems based on combining the Genetic algorithm and Simulated annealing, together with a local search strategy. The proposed hybrid approach combines the merits of genetic algorithm (GA) with simulated annealing (SA) to construct a more efficient genetic simulated annealing (GSA) algorithm for global search, which could well maintain the population diversity in GA evolution without becoming easily trapped in local optimum. The iterative hill climbing (IHC) method as a local search technique is incorporated into GSA loop to speed up the convergence of the algorithm. In addition, a self-adaptive hybrid mechanism is developed to maintain a tradeoff between the global and local optimizer searching then to efficiently locate quality solution to complex optimization problem. The computational results indicate that the global searching ability and the convergence speed of this hybrid algorithm are significantly improved. Some well-known benchmark functions are utilized to test the applicability of the proposed algorithm.