Testing parallel evolution strategies on the quadratic assignment problem

Parallel evolution strategies are demonstrating to be worthwhile in a variety of contexts. In this paper, besides the classical genetic and evolutionary strategies, a hybrid evolutionary approach which incorporates memory of the search history within the structure is analyzed. The parallel evolution algorithms are mapped on a distributed memory MIMD multicomputer whose processors are configured in a torus topology. The simulations are conducted using the quadratic assignment problem as an artificial environment. The relationship between genetic representations and recombination operators is investigated. The experimental results obtained show the value of structures richer than bit strings and the effectiveness of memory for the evolution process