A Generic Approach to Parameter Control

On-line control of EA parameters is an approach to parameter setting that offers the advantage of values changing during the run. In this paper, we investigate parameter control from a generic and parameter-independent perspective. We propose a generic control mechanism that is targeted to repetitive applications, can be applied to any numeric parameter and is tailored to specific types of problems through an off-line calibration process. We present proof-of-concept experiments using this mechanism to control the mutation step size of an Evolutionary Strategy (ES). Results show that our method is viable and performs very well, compared to the tuning approach and traditional control methods. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.