The synergetic effects of hybrid crossover operators in structural optimisation

Abstract

The development of the crossover operator is based on three different mechanisms:mating selection mechanism, offspring generation mechanism and offspring selection mechanism.Most of the crossover operators are able to get exploration or exploitation of the domaindepending on the way in which they handle the current diversity of the population. Eachcrossover operator directs the search towards a different zone in the neighbourhood of theparents. The quality of the elements that belong to the visited region depends on the particularproblem to be solved. This is confirmed by the well known no free lunch theorems. Thesimultaneous use of diverse crossover operators on the population will induce more efficientalgorithms. The aiming of this paper is to analyze and to study the complementary propertiesresulting from the synergetic effects using several crossover operators in genetic algorithms.The improvements reached in structural optimization using hybrid crossover operators willbe analyzed through some standard examples.