Directed Mutation by Means of the Skew-Normal Distribution

Directed mutation can improve the efficiency of processing many optimization problems. The directed mutation operator presented in this paper is based on the Skew-Normal Distribution. It is the first one that is not defined by case differentiation. Its expectation as well as its variance are convergent for all degrees of skewness and random number generation is simple and fast. An appropriate recombination scheme is given, and experimental results using this directed mutation are presented.