Summary and final remarks

Abstract

With the materials provided in the six previous chapters, we hope to have extended and deepened knowledge about evolutionary algorithms applied to multimodal blackbox optimization problems. It is now time to summarize the main insights, review what we achieved in comparison to the original goals listed in Sect. 1, and give some hints concerning promising future search directions. Before we turn to the last of these three issues, we will deal with the first (summary) in the context of the second (goals), as each of the chapters is tightly linked to one of the goals. The only exception to this is Sect. 2, which presents our view on the current state of an experimental methodology for research in evolutionary computation and related fields. It may be seen as a summary of the many experiences with experimental research the author has been involved with in the last few years. As the amount of available theory concerning evolutionary computation applied to multimodal problems is small, it is quite important to do experiments in a structured and well-defined way and we make an effort to respect this throughout the whole work.