A study on the effect of multi-parent recombination in real coded genetic algorithms

We investigate real coded genetic algorithms in which more than two parents are involved in recombination operation. We propose three types of multi-parent recombination operators; the center of mass crossover (CMX), multi-parent feature-wise crossover (MFX), and seed crossover (SX). Each of these operators is a natural generalization of 2-parent recombination operator. These operators are evaluated on several test functions. The results showed clearly that multi-parent recombinations lead to better performance, although the performance improvement for different techniques were found to be dependent on problems.