Building with ParadisEO reusable parallel and distributed evolutionary algorithms

Numerous parallel and distributed evolutionary algorithms (PDEAs) and their implementations have been proposed and are available on the Web. A robust approach to make easier their code and design reuse is the framework approach. In this paper, we present some existing frameworks for PDEAs and their development requirements, and propose a new C++ open source framework, named Parallel and distributed Evolving Objects (ParadisEO). ParadisEO is basically devoted to the reusable and flexible design of parallel and distributed metaheuristics, but we focus here only on PDEAs. Compared to other related frameworks, ParadisEO allows more reuse flexibility, and provides more implemented parallel and distributed models. Furthermore, these models can be exploited by the user in a transparent way, and deployed as well on shared memory multi-processors as on distributed memory machines. The architecture has been experimented on two real-world applications: the radio network design and the spectroscopic data mining. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the different models. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.