JEAF: A Java Evolutionary Algorithm Framework

There are not many tools in the evolutionary computing field that allow researchers to implement, modify or compare different algorithms. Additionally, those tools usually lack flexibility, maintenance or some other characteristic, so researchers program their own solutions most of the time, reimplementing algorithms that have already been implemented hundreds of times. This paper introduces a new framework for evolutionary computation called JEAF (Java Evolutionary Algorithm Framework) that tries to offer a platform to facilitate the tasks of comparing, analyzing, modifying and implementing evolutionary algorithms, reusing components and programming as few as possible. JEAF also aims to be a tool for evolutionary algorithm users that employ these algorithms to solve other problems not related with evolutionary computation. In this sense, JEAF provides methods to distribute an evolutionary process and to plug external tools to perform the evaluation of candidate solutions.