Artificially inducing environmental changes in evolutionary dynamic optimization

Biological and artificial evolution can be speeded up by environmental changes. From the evolutionary computation perspective, environmental changes during the optimization process generate dynamic optimization problems (DOPs). However, only DOPs caused by intrinsic changes have been investigated in the area of evolutionary dynamic optimization (EDO). This paper is devoted to investigate artificially induced DOPs. A framework to generate artificially induced DOPs from any pseudo-Boolean problem is proposed. We use this framework to induce six different types of changes in a 0–1 knapsack problem and test which one results in higher speed up. Two strategies based on immigrants, which are used in EDO, are adapted to the artificially induced DOPs investigated here. Some types of changes did not result in better performance, while some types led to higher speed up. The algorithm with memory based immigrants presented very good performance.