On the Difficulty of Evolving Permutation Codes

AbstractCombinatorial designs provide an interesting source of optimization problems. Among them, permutation codes are particularly given their applications in powerline communications, flash memories, and block ciphers. This paper addresses the design by evolutionary algorithms (EA) developing iterative approach. Starting from a single random permutation, new permutations satisfying minimum distance constraint incrementally added to code using permutation-based EA. We investigate our approach against four different fitness functions targeting requirement at levels detail with two policies concerning expansion pruning. compare results achieved EA those simple search, remarking that neither method scales well problem size.KeywordsPermutation codesEvolutionary algorithmsIncremental constructionPowerline communicationsFlash memoriesBlock ciphers