A Novel Collective Crossover Operator for Genetic Algorithms

Crossover is the main genetic operator which influences the power of evolutionary algorithms. Among a variety of crossover operators, there has been a growing interest in multi-parent crossover operators in evolutionary computation. The main motivation of those schemes is establishing comprehensive collective collaboration of more than two chromosomes in the population to generate a new offspring. In this paper, a novel all-parent crossover operator called collective crossover for genetic algorithm is proposed. In this method, all individuals in the current population are involved in recombination part and one offspring is generated. The contribution of each individuals is defined based on its quality in terms of fitness value. The performance of the collective crossover operator is tested on CEC-2017 benchmark functions. The results revealed that the proposed crossover operator performs better when compared to well-known two-parent crossover operators including one-point and two-point crossovers. In addition, the differences between collective crossover and the other crossover operators are statistically significant for the most cases.