Gene linkage identification in permutation problems for local search and genetic local search

This paper proposes a gene linkage detection method to identify the gene linkage of each gene for a genetic algorithm applied to permutation problems. Linkage is defined as the tightness of loci in a chromosome. In the literature, many studies on linkage are devoted to binary-coded chromosomes. We propose an idea to identify the gene linkage in permutation problems where an chromosome is represented by a permutation of different alleles. We apply the proposed local search method to a standard local search and a genetic local search. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method by computer simulations on flowshop scheduling problems.