Controls and Control Theory Commons^™

Many optimization problems are multi-modal. In certain cases, we are interested in finding multiple locally optimal solutions rather than just a single optimum as is computed by traditional genetic algorithms (GAs). Several niching techniques have been developed that seek to find multiple such local optima. These techniques, which include sharing and crowding, are clearly powerful and useful. But they do not explicitly let the user control the number of local optima being computed, which we believe to be an important capability.

In this paper, we develop a method that provides, as an input parameter to niching, the desired number of …