On the Usefulness of the Evolution Strategies’ Self-Adaptation Mechanism to Handle Constraints in Global Optimization

In this paper, we argue that the original self-adaptation mechanism of the Evolution Strategies is useful by itself to handle constraints in global optimization. We show how using just three simple comparison criteria the simple Evolution Strategy can be led to the feasible region of the search space and find the global optimum solution (or a very good approximation of it). Different Evolution Strategies including and with or without correlated mutation were implemented. Such approaches have been tested using the well-known test suit of Michalewicz and Schnoenauer and four engineering problems. The results are discussed and some conclusions are drawn.