Population initialization in the context of a biased, problem-specific mutation

Several aspects of incorporating domain-specific knowledge into evolutionary computations are discussed. Some interesting properties are described which have been observed during deeper investigations of an algorithm for telecommunication network design. The algorithm was presented by J. Arabas (1995) and compared to other design techniques by S. Kozdrowski et al. (1997) showing comparable or better performance. In this paper, most attention is paid to the proper initialization of the population and to its interference with a knowledge-based mutation operator. Experimental results for several design problems are included to exemplify the observations.