Empirically-Derived Population Size and Mutation Rate Guidelines for a Genetic Algorithm with Uniform Crossover

The Genetic Algorithm (GA) is employed by different users to solve many problems; however, various challenges and issues surround the appropriate form and parameter settings of the GA. One of these issues is the conflict between theory and experiment regarding the crossover operator. Experimental results suggest that the uniform crossover can provide better results for optimization, so many users wish to employ this approach. Unlike for the single-point crossover GA, no established set of guidelines exists to assist in choosing appropriate population sizes and mutation rates when using the uniform crossover. This paper presents the results of an empirical study to determine such guidelines by examining several parameter combinations on four mathematical functions and one engineering design problem. The resulting guidelines appear to be valid over these test problems. They are presented and discussed, with the intent that they may provide assistance to users of GAs with uniform crossover.