Constraint Handling Guided by Landscape Analysis in Combinatorial and Continuous Search Spaces

The notion and characterisation of fitness landscapes has helped us understand the performance of heuristic algorithms on complex optimisation problems. Many practical problems, however, are constrained, and when significant areas of the search space are infeasible, researchers have intuitively resorted to a variety of constraint-handling techniques intended to help the algorithm manoeuvre through infeasible areas and toward feasible regions of better fitness. It is clear that providing constraint-related feedback to the algorithm to influence its choice of solutions overlays the violation landscape with the fitness landscape in unpredictable ways whose effects on the algorithm cannot be directly measured. In this work, we apply metrics of violation landscapes to continuous and combinatorial problems to characterise them. We relate this information to the relative performance of six well-known constraint-handling techniques to demonstrate how some properties of constrained landscapes favour particular con...