SGE: A structured representation for grammatical evolution

Abstract

This paper introduces Structured Grammatical Evolution, a new genotypic representation for Grammatical Evolution, where each gene is explicitly linked to a non-terminal of the grammar being used. This one-to-one correspondence ensures that the modification of a gene does not affect the derivation options of other non-terminals, thereby increasing locality. The performance of the new representation is accessed on a set of benchmark problems. The results obtained confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach, as it is able to outperform standard grammatical evolution on all selected optimization problems.