Evolutionary Design Space Decomposition

Abstract

The chapter investigates the potential of evolutionary and adaptive search for the decomposition of complex multi-dimensional design spaces into succinct regions of high-performance solutions. Many evolutionary search techniques that attempt to identify and maintain multiple local optima within a multi-modal fitness landscape have been developed within the EC research community and are described in the literature; a selection of these are outlined in the following section. The perceived utility of such techniques when applied in the design domain is that they can return a number of high-performance solutions to the engineer for further off-line evaluation. Such techniques can be of considerable value when applied to specific well-defined problems where some a priori knowledge relating to the nature of the fitness landscape is available.