A Genetic Programming Based Heuristic to Simplify Rugged Landscapes Exploration

Some optimization problems are difficult to solve due to a considerable number of local optima, which may result in premature convergence of the optimization process. To address this problem, we propose a novel heuristic method for constructing a smooth surrogate model of the original function. The surrogate function is easier to optimize but maintains a fundamental property of the original rugged fitness landscape: the location of the global optimum. To create such a surrogate model, we consider a linear genetic programming approach coupled with a self-tuning fitness function. More specifically, to evaluate the fitness of the produced surrogate functions, we employ Fuzzy Self-Tuning Particle Swarm Optimization, a setting-free version of particle swarm optimization. To assess the performance of the proposed method, we considered a set of benchmark functions characterized by high noise and ruggedness. Moreover, the method is evaluated over different problems’ dimensionalities. The proposed approach reveals its suitability for performing the proposed task. In particular, experimental results confirm its capability to find the global argminimum for all the considered benchmark problems and all the domain dimensions taken into account, thus providing an innovative and promising strategy for dealing with challenging optimization problems.