Scheduling social golfers with memetic evolutionary programming

Abstract

The social golfer problem (SGP) has attracted significant attention in recent years because of its highly symmetrical, constrained, and combinatorial nature. Nowadays, it constitutes one of the standard benchmarks in the area of constraint programming. This paper presents the first evolutionary approach to the SGP. We propose a memetic algorithm (MA) that combines ideas from evolutionary programming and tabu search. In order to lessen the influence of the high number of symmetries present in the problem, the MA does not make use of recombination operators. The search is thus propelled by selection, mutation, and local search. In connection with the latter, we analyze the effect of baldwinian and lamarckian learning in the performance of the MA. An experimental study shows that the MA is capable of improving results reported in the literature, and supports the superiority of lamarckian strategies in this problem. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.