Extended Forking Genetic Algorithm for Order Representation (O-FGA)

There are two types of GAs with difference of their representation of strings. They are the binary coded GA and the order-based GA. We’ve already proposed a new type of binary coded GA, called the forking GA (fGA), as a kind of multi-population GA and showed that the searching power of the fGA is superior to the standard GA. The distinguished feature of the fGA is that each population takes a different role in optimization. That is, each population is responsible for searching in a non-overlapping sub-area of the search space. In this paper, the extended forking GA for order representation, called the o-fGA, is proposed. The results of experiments for the blind traveling salesperson problem (TSP) show that the approach of fGA is also effective for the order representation.