Application of genetic algorithms and simulated annealing technique in optimising the aperture distributions of antenna array patterns

Simulated annealing and genetic algorithms are used for finding optimum excitations for patterns with null-filling. These methods have the advantage that the optimum aperture distribution with a minimal variation between excitations of adjacent elements is found without searching the entire solution space. A comparison between the performance of both methods shows that genetic algorithms are faster than simulated annealing, for this problem.