Abstract

Evolutionary computation has been applied to numerous design tasks, including design of electric circuits, neural networks, and genetic circuits. Though it is a very effective solution for optimizing network structures, genetic algorithm faces many difficulties, often referred to as the permutation problems, when both topologies and the weights of the network are the target of optimization. We propose a new crossover method used in conjunction with a genotype with information tags. The information tags allow GA to recognize and preserve the common structure of parent chromosomes during genetic crossover. The method is implemented along with subpopulating strategies to make the parallel evolution of network topology and weights feasible and efficient. The proposed method is evaluated on a few typical and practical problems, and shows improvement from conventional methodologies and genotypes.