On the effect of multi-parents recombination in binary coded genetic algorithms

The recombination operator plays a very important role in genetic algorithms. We present binary coded genetic algorithms in which more than two parents are involved in the recombination operation. We propose two types of multi-parent recombination operators, the multi-cut (MX) and seed crossover (SX). Each of these operators is a natural generalization of two parents recombination operator. These operators are evaluated on the De Jong standard test functions. The results showed clearly that the multi-parent recombinations lead to better performance, although the performance improvement for different techniques were found to be dependent on problems.