Real-coded Micro-Genetic Algorithm for Nonlinear Constrained Engineering Designs

The performance of optimisation methods, based on penalty functions, is highly problem- dependent and many methods require additional tuning of some variables. This additional tuning is the influences of penalty coefficient, which depend strongly on the degree of constraint violation. Moreover, Binary-coded Genetic Algorithm (BGA) meets certain difficulties when dealing with continuous and/or discrete search spaces with large dimensions. With the above reasons, Real-coded Micro-Genetic Algorithm (R$\mu$GA) is proposed to find the global optimum of continuous and/or discrete nonlinear constrained engineering problems without handling any of penalty functions. R$\mu$GA can help in avoiding the premature convergence and search for global solution-spaces, because of its wide spread applicability, global perspective and inherent parallelism. The proposed R$\mu$GA approach has been demonstrated by solving three different engineering design problems. From the simulation results, it has been concluded that R$\mu$GA is an effective global optimisation tool for solving continuous and/or discrete nonlinear constrained real­world optimisation problems.