A theory of representations is not taken as given, but is developed and applied to real-world problems of commercial importance

Includes supplementary material: [...]

1. Introduction.- 1.1 Purpose.- 1.2 Organization.- 2. Representations for Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms.- 2.1 Genetic Representations.- 2.2 Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms.- 2.3 Problem Difficulty.- 2.4 Existing Recommendations for the Design of Efficient Representations for Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms.- 3. Three Elements of a Theory of Genetic and Evolutionary Representations.- 3.1 Redundancy.- 3.2 Building Block-Scaling.- 3.3 Distance Distortion.- 3.4 Summary and Conclusions.- 4. Time-Quality Framework for a Theory-Based Analysis and Design of Representations.- 4.1 Solution Quality and Time to Convergence.- 4.2 Elements of the Framework.- 4.3 The Framework.- 4.4 Implications for the Design of Representations.- 4.5 Summary and Conclusions.- 5. Analysis of Binary Representations of Integers.- 5.1 Two Integer Optimization Problems.- 5.2 Binary String Representations.- 5.3 A Theoretical Comparison.- 5.4 Empirical Results.- 5.5 Conclusions.- 6. Analysis of Tree Representations.- 6.1 The Tree Design Problem.- 6.2 Prüfer Numbers.- 6.3 The Link and Node Biased Encoding.- 6.4 The Characteristic Vector Encoding.- 6.5 Conclusions.- 7. Design of Tree Representations.- 7.1 Network Random Keys (NetKeys).- 7.2 A Direct Tree Representation (NetDir).- 8. Performance of Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms on Tree Problems.- 8.1 GEA Performance on Scalable Test Tree Problems.- 8.2 GEA Performance on the Optimal Communication Spanning Tree Problem.- 8.3 Summary.- 9. Summary, Conclusions and Future Work.- 9.1 Summary.- 9.2 Conclusions.- 9.3 Future Work.- A. Optimal Communication Spanning Tree Test Instances.- A.1 Palmer's Test Instances.- A.2 Raidl's Test Instances.- A.3 Berry's Test Instances.- A.4 Real World Problems.- References.- List of Symbols.- List ofAcronyms.