Experimental Methods

In this chapter we will provide the details of the experimental methodology used in this research. The second section of this chapter will provide background regarding dynamic fitness landscape test problem generators. The third section will identify the requirements for a test problem generator in dynamic environments. The fourth section will provide the details of a test problem generator that was developed as part of this research to address the issues identified in the second section and the requirements identified in the third section. The fifth section will describe the details of the test problems examined in this study. The next section will describe experiments used to compare the results of our new technique to previous EA techniques used for dynamic environments. Finally, the last section of this chapter will describe the specific experiments conducted to examine the usefulness of our sentinel placement algorithm for population initialization in EAs working in static environments.