Multi-island competitive cooperative coevolution for real parameter global optimization

Abstract

Problem decomposition is an important attribute of cooperative coevolution that depends on the nature of the problems in terms of separability which is defined by the level of interaction amongst decision variables. Recent work in cooperative coevolution featured competition and collaboration of problem decomposition methods that was implemented as islands in a method known as competitive island cooperative coevolution (CICC). In this paper, a multi-island competitive cooperative coevolution algorithm (MICCC) is proposed in which several different problem decomposition strategies are given a chance to compete, collaborate and motivate other islands while converging to a common solution. The performance of MICCC is evaluated on eight different benchmark functions and are compared with CICC where only two islands were utilized. The results from the experimental analysis show that competition and collaboration of several different island can yield solutions with a quality better than the two-island competition algorithm (CICC) on most complex multi-modal problems.