A study on the efficiency of neutral crossover operators in genetic algorithms applied to the bin packing problem

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of neutral crossover operators in a genetic algorithm (GA) applied to the one-dimensional bin packing problem. In the experimentation 16 benchmark instances have been used and the results obtained by three different GAs are compared with the ones obtained by an evolutionary algorithm (EA). The aim of this work is to determine whether an EA (with no crossover functions) can perform similarly to a GA.