Analyzing the Simple Ranking and Selection Process for Constrained Evolutionary Optimization

Many optimization problems that involve practical applications have functional constraints, and some of these constraints are active, meaning that they prevent any solution from improving the objective function value to the one that is better than any solution lying beyond the constraint limits. Therefore, the optimal solution usually lies on the boundary of the feasible region. In order to converge faster when solving such problems, a new ranking and selection scheme is introduced which exploits this feature of constrained problems. In conjunction with selection, a new crossover method is also presented based on three parents. When comparing the results of this new algorithm with six other evolutionary based methods, using 12 benchmark problems from the literature, it shows very encouraging performance. T-tests have been applied in this research to show if there is any statistically significance differences between the algorithms. A study has also been carried out in order to show the effect of each component of the proposed algorithm.