Evolutionary self-adaptation: a survey of operators and strategy parameters

The success of evolutionary search depends on adequate parameter settings. Ill conditioned strategy parameters decrease the success probabilities of genetic operators. Proper settings may change during the optimization process. The question arises if adequate settings can be found automatically during the optimization process. Evolution strategies gave an answer to the online parameter control problem decades ago: self-adaptation. Self-adaptation is the implicit search in the space of strategy parameters. The self-adaptive control of mutation strengths in evolution strategies turned out to be exceptionally successful. Nevertheless, for years self-adaptation has not achieved the attention it deserves. This paper is a survey of self-adaptive parameter control in evolutionary computation. It classifies self-adaptation in the taxonomy of parameter setting techniques, gives an overview of automatic online-controllable evolutionary operators and provides a coherent view on search techniques in the space of strategy parameters. Beyer and Sendhoff’s covariance matrix self-adaptation evolution strategy is reviewed as a successful example for self-adaptation and exemplarily tested for various concepts that are discussed.