Mobility - A study on the impact of heuristic initialization functions in a genetic algorithm solving the N-queens problem

A study on the impact of heuristic initialization functions in a genetic algorithm solving the N-queens problem

Authors

Eneko Osaba
Fernando Díaz
Roberto Carballedo
Enrique Onieva
Pedro López

Abstract

In this paper the influence of using heuristic functions to initialize the population of a classic genetic algorithm (GA) applied to the N-Queens Problem (NQP) is analyzed. The aim of this work is to evaluate the impact of the heuristic initialization phase on the results of the classic GA. In order to probe this, several experiments using two different initialization functions have been carried out. In this paper, the well-known NQP has been used as benchmark problem, but the objective of the authors is to contrast the findings of this study with other combinatorial optimization problems.