The Hierarchical Fair Competition -HFC Framework 2005.pdf

The Hierarchical Fair Competition (HFC) Framework for Sustainable Evolutionary Algorithms Jianjun Hu hujianju@msu.edu Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Erik Goodman goodman@egr.msu.edu Kisung Seo ksseo@egr.msu.edu Zhun Fan fanzhun@egr.msu.edu Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rondal Rosenberg rosenber@egr.msu.edu Department of Mechanical Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48823, USA Abstract Many current Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) suffer from a tendency to converge pre- maturely or stagnate without progress for complex problems. This may be due to the loss of or failure to discover certain valuable genetic material or the loss of the capa- bility to discover new genetic material before convergence has limited the algorithm’s ability to search widely. In this paper, the Hierarchical Fair Competition (HFC) model, including several variants, is proposed as a generic framework for sustainable evo- lutionary search by transforming the convergent nature of the current EA framework into a non-convergent search process. That is, the structure of HFC does not allow the convergence of the population to the vicinity of any set of optimal or locally optimal solutions. The sustainable search capability of HFC is achieved by ensuring a contin- uous supply and the incorporation of genetic material in a hierarchical manner, and by culturing and maintaining, but continually renewing, populations of individuals of intermediate fitness levels. HFC employs an assembly-line structure in which subpop- ulations are hierarchically organized into different fitness levels, reducing the selection pressure within each subpopulation while maintaining the global selection pressure to help ensure the exploitation of the good genetic material found. Three EAs based on the HFC principle are tested - two on the even-10-parity genetic programming bench- mark problem and a real-world analog circuit synthesis problem, and another on the HIFF gene