A comparative study between migration and pair-swap on quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm dependency evaluation on the parameter of rotation angle unit

Abstract

Quantum-inspired Evolutionary Algorithm (QEA) has been proposed as one of stochastic algorithms of evolutionary computation instead of a quantum algorithm. The authors have proposed Quantum-inspired Evolutionary Algorithm based on Pair Swap (QEAPS), which uses pair swap operator and does not group individuals in order to simplify QEA and reduce parameters in QEA. QEA and QEAPS imitationally use quantum bits as genes and superposition states in quantum computation. QEAPS has shown better search performance than QEA on knapsack problem, while eliminating parameters about immigration intervals and number of groups. However, QEAPS still has a parameter in common with QEA, a rotation angle unit, which is uncommon among other evolutionary computation algorithms. The rotation angle unit deeply affects exploitation and exploration control in QEA, but it has been unclear how the parameter influences QEAPS to behave. This paper aims to show that QEAPS involves few parameters and even those parameters can be adjusted easily. Experimental results, in knapsack problem and number partitioning problem which have different characteristics, have shown that QEAPS is competitive with other metaheuristics in search performance, and that QEAPS is robust against the parameter configuration and problem characteristics.