Making use of more information about the problem goes along with our use of domain expert knowledge. A design will usually identify different sets of members as playing different “roles” in the design. An expert designer makes use of that information in various ways, treating groups of elements collectively when coming up with an initial rough design, for example. Operators that used such information would be a natural extension to our current design. Similarly, any symmetries that could be identified by the designer or in
a pre-processing step could be exploited in the GA.