The Practical Use of Problem Encoding Allowing Cheap Fitness Computation of Mutated Individuals

The usual assumption in the Evolutionary Computation field is that a cost of computing single fitness function evaluation is at last similar for all cases. Such assumption does not have to be true. In this paper we consider the recently proposed Problem Encoding Allowing Cheap Fitness Computation of Mutated Individuals (PEACh) effect that allows to significantly reduce the computation load of some of the fitness computations that occur during the evolutionary method run. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first experimental analysis that investigates the results of PEACh application to methods solving NP-hard practical problems.