Tip the Balance: Improving Exploration of Balanced Crossover Operators by Adaptive Bias

The use of balanced crossover operators in Genetic Algorithms (GA) ensures that the binary strings generated as offsprings have the same Hamming weight of the parents, a constraint which is sought in certain discrete optimization problems. Although this method reduces the size of the search space, the resulting fitness landscape often becomes more difficult for the GA to explore and to discover optimal solutions. This issue has been studied in this paper by applying an adaptive bias strategy to a counter-based crossover operator that introduces unbalancedness in the offspring with a certain probability, which is decreased throughout the evolutionary process. Experiments show that improving the exploration of the search space with this adaptive bias strategy is beneficial for the GA performances in terms of the number of optimal solutions found, even if these benefits are not reflected in the resulting fitness distributions.