Experimental Study on Pair Swap Strategy in Quantum-Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm

Quantum-Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm (QEA), a type of stochastic algorithm for solving combinatorial optimization problems, is evolutionary computation using quantum bits and superposition states in quantum computation. Although coarse-grained parallel, QEA has many parameters that must be adjusted manually. The simpler algorithm, Quantum-inspired Evolutionary Computation with Pair Swap operator (QEAPS), the authors propose involves just one population and a simple genetic operation exchanging best solution information between two individuals chosen randomly, instead of the migration operation used in QEA, and thereby fewer parameters to be adjusted. The authors found in experiments that QEAPS finds highly qualified solutions, is more robust against constraint handling, and has a higher search performance of thanks to diversified best solution information.