On linkage identification in EC for solving combinatorial optimization problems

This paper proposes a new linkage identification method based on the notion of evolution of linkages, which is designed for evolutionary computation schemes to solve combinatorial optimization problems (COP). Linkage identification is a task to identify an appropriate fragment of genes contained in a chromosome that is expected to significantly increase the fitness of the overall individuals. As a concrete target problem of the proposed scheme, we focus on the traveling salesman problem (TSP) that is known as a typical COP. The performance of the scheme is experimentally evaluated by using TSPLIB, and is compared with the performance of previous schemes. The result of experiments shows that the proposed scheme really improves the performance of the previous scheme, and the amount of improvement is 42.7% in the best case.