A Novel Magnetic Update Operator for Quantum Evolutionary Algorithms

Quantum Evolutionary Algorithms (QEA) are novel algorithms proposed for class of combinatorial optimization problems. The probabilistic representation of possible solutions in QEA helps the q-individuals to represent all the search space simultaneously. In QEA, Q-Gate plays the role of update operator and moves qindividuals toward better parts of search space to represent better possible solutions with higher probability. This paper proposes an alternative magnetic update operator for QEA. In the proposed update operator the q-individuals are some magnetic particles attracting each other. The force two particles apply to each other depends on their fitness and their distance. The population has a cellular structure and each q-individual has four neighbors. Each q-individual is attracted by its four binary solution neighbors. The proposed algorithm is tested on Knapsack Problems, Trap problem and fourteen numerical function optimization problems. Experimental results show better performance for the proposed update operator than Q-Gate.