Application of genetic algorithms and simulated annealing technique in optimizing the aperture distributions of antenna arrays

Simulated annealing and genetic algorithms are used to find optimum excitations for patterns with null-filling. These methods have the advantage that the optimum aperture distribution with a minimal variation between excitations of adjacent elements, is found without searching the entire solution space. A comparison between the performance of both methods shows that genetic algorithms are faster than simulated annealing, for this problem.