Combining Mutation and Recombination to Improve a Distributed Model of Adaptive Operator Selection

Abstract. We present evidence indicating that adding a crossover is-land greatly improves the performance of a Dynamic Island Model for Adaptive Operator Selection. Two combinatorial optimisation problems are considered: the Onemax benchmark, to prove the concept; and a real-world formulation of the course timetabling problem to test prac-tical relevance. Crossover is added to the recently proposed dynamic island adaptive model for operator selection which considered mutation only. When comparing the models with and without a recombination, we found that having a crossover island significantly improves the perfor-mance. Our experiments also provide compelling evidence of the dynamic role of crossover during search: it is a useful operator across the whole search process. The idea of combining different type of operators in a distributed adaptive search model is worth further investigation.