On the Effects of Migration on the Fitness Distribution of Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms

Migration of individuals between populations may increase the selection pressure. This has the desirable consequence of speeding up convergence, but it may result in an excessively rapid loss of variation that may cause the search to fail. This paper investigates the effects of migration on the distribution of fitness. It considers arbitrary migration rates and topologies with different number of neighbors, and it compares algorithms that are configured to have the same selection intensity. The results suggest that migration preserves more diversity as the number of neighbors of a deme increases