Incremental evolution of local search heuristics
In evolutionary computation, incremental evolution refers to the process of employing an evolutionary environment that becomes increasingly complex over time. We present an implementation of this approach to develop randomised local search heuristics for constraint satisfaction problems, combining research on incremental evolution with local search heuristics evolution. A population of local search heuristics is evolved using a genetic programming framework on a simple problem for a short period and is then allowed to evolve on a more complex problem. Experiments compare the performance of this population with that of a randomly initialised population evolving directly on the more complex problem. The results obtained show that incremental evolution can represent a significant improvement in terms of optimisation speed, solution quality and solution structure.