Evolutionary Computation for Modeling and Optimization

Abstract

Preface This book is an adaptation of notes that have been used to teach a class in evolutionary computation at Iowa State University for eight years. A number of people have used the notes over the years, and by publishing them in book form I hope to make the material available to a wider audience. It is important to state clearly what this book is and what it is not. It is a text for an undergraduate or first-year graduate course in evolutionary computation for computer science, engineering, or other computational science students. The large number of homework problems, projects, and experiments stem from an effort to make the text accessible to undergraduates with some programming skill. This book is directed mainly toward application of evolu- tionary algorithms. This book is not a complete introduction to evolutionary computation, nor does it contain a history of the discipline. It is not a theoret- ical treatment of evolutionary computation, lacking chapters on the schema theorem and the no free lunch theorem.