Multimodal optimization by means of evolutionary algorithms (Q2250595)

This book, divided into seven chapters, studies multimodal optimization problems and the tools and techniques used for their solution, with a focus on evolutionary algorithms. The first chapter presents a useful introduction to multimodal optimization and the particular challenges that it poses compared to similar optimization fields. The second chapter considers the notion of experimentation and experimentalism in computer science and its importance to the field of evolutionary algorithms and multimodal optimization. The next chapter introduces the concept of niching in evolutionary computation, which is a central idea in the context of multimodal optimization. This is followed by an introduction to the nearest-better method for clustering and its performance compared to alternative methods. The fifth and sixth chapters present the classification of niching methods and the associated algorithms for a variety of multimodal optimization problems. Several examples are presented and studied and a large number of algorithms are evaluated and classified. This very interesting book concludes with a summary chapter on the applicability of evolutionary algorithms to multimodal black-box optimization problems and a list of relevant references.