Adaptive Niching Via Coevolutionary Sharing

An adaptive niching scheme called coevolutionary shared niching (CSN) is proposed, implemented, analyzed and tested. The scheme overcomes the limitations of xed sharing schemes by permitting the locations and radii of niches to adapt to complex landscapes, thereby permitting a better distribution of solutions in problems with many badly spaced optima. The scheme takes its inspiration from the model of monopolistic competition in economics and utilizes two populations, a population of businessmen and a population of customers, where the locations of the businessmen correspond to niche locations and the locations of customers correspond to solutions. Initial results on straightforward test functions validate the distributional e ectiveness of the basic scheme, although tests on a massively multimodal function do not nd the best niches in the allotted time. This result spurs the design of an imprint mechanism that turns the best customers into businessmen, thereby making better use of the search power of the large population of customers. Although additional testing is needed, coevolutionary sharing appears to be a powerful means of controlling the number, location, extent and distribution of solutions in complex landscapes.