Adaptive mutation rate control schemes in genetic algorithms

Abstract The adaptation of mutation rate parameter values is important to allow the search process to optimize its performance during run time. In addition it frees the user of the need to make non-trivial decisions beforehand. Contrary to real vector coded genotypes, for discrete genotypes most users still prefer to use a fixed mutation rate. Here we propose two simple adaptive mutation rate control schemes, and show their feasibility in comparison with a fixed mutation rate, a self-adaptive mutation rate and a deterministically scheduled dynamic mutation rate. Keywords—Adaptive mutation, Constant gain adaptive mutation, Declining adaptive mutation, Counting ones problem, Zero/one multiple knapsack problem.