3) Parameters of the Genetic Algorithm: One of the difficulties of genetic algorithms is finding the best internal parameters in order to optimize speed and convergence.
These parameters are
• Size of the initial population
• Number of generations
• Crossover probability
• Mutation probability
• Rate of elitism.
The parameter values to be used are dependent on the type of GA operators used. In order to be able to compare the performance of the two crossover operators used, we tried to
keep the rest of the parameters the same.
After quite a lot of trial and error, the parameter values as presented in Table 2 appeared to be adequate.
A rather low crossover probability (0.1) together with a high mutation probability (1.0) yielded the best results in the first series of experiments.
This is remarkable since it actually means that the two-point orderbased
crossover does not really works fine.