dortmund.de

The present paper investigates the hybridization of two well-known multimodal optimization methods, i.e. species con-servation and multinational algorithms. The topological species conservation algorithm embraces the vision of the existence of subpopulations around seeds (the best local in-dividuals) and the preservation of these dominating indi-viduals from one generation to another, but detects multi-modality by means of the hill-valley mechanism employed by multinational algorithms. The aim is to inherit the strengths of both parent techniques and at the same time overcome their flaws. The species conservation algorithm efficiently keeps track of several good search space regions at once, but is difficult to parametrize without prior problem knowledge. Conversely, the multinational algorithms use many function evaluations to establish subpopulations, but do not depend on provided radius parameter values. Experiments with all three algorithms are made on a wide range of test problems in order to investigate their advantages and shortcomings