On the harmonious mating strategy through tabu search

Genetic algorithms (GAs) are well-known heuristic algorithms and have been applied to solve a variety of complicated problems. When adopting GA approaches, two important issues--selection pressure and population diversity--must be considered. This work presents a novel mating strategy, called tabu genetic algorithm (TGA), which harmonizes these two issues by integrating tabu search (TS) into GA's selection. TGA incorporates the tabu list to prevent inbreeding so that population diversity can be maintained, and further utilizes the aspiration criterion to supply moderate selection pressure. An accompanied self-adaptive mutation method is also proposed to overcome the difficulty of determining mutation rate, which is sensitive to computing performance. The classic traveling salesman problem is used as a benchmark to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results indicate that TGA can achieve harmony between population diversity and selection pressure. Comparisons with GA, TS, and hybrids of GA and TS further confirm the superiority of TGA in terms of both solution quality and convergence speed.