Investigation into mutation operators for Microbial Genetic Algorithm

Microbial Genetic Algorithm (MGA) is a simple variant of genetic algorithm and is inspired by bacterial conjugation for evolution. In this paper we have discussed and analyzed variants of this less exploited algorithm on known benchmark testing functions to suggest a suitable choice of mutation operator. We also proposed a simple adaptive scheme to adjust the impact of mutation according to the diversity in population in a cost effective way. Our investigation suggests that a clever choice of mutation operator can enhance the performance of basic MGA significantly.