Speeding up evolutionary algorithms through restricted mutation operators

Abstract

We investigate the effect of restricting the mutation operator in evolutionary algorithms with respect to the runtime behavior. For the Eulerian cycle problem; we present runtime bounds on evolutionary algorithms with a restricted operator that are much smaller than the best upper bounds for the general case. It turns out that a plateau that both algorithms have to cope with is left faster by the new algorithm. In addition, we present a lower bound for the unrestricted algorithm which shows that the restricted operator speeds up computation by at least a linear factor. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.