Investigating Selection Pressure in Asynchronous Cellular Evolutionary Algorithms

This paper presents a theoretical study of the selection pressure in asynchronous cellular evolutionary algorithms. Our work is motivated by a search for a unified model for asynchronous update of the individuals in a cellular EA and by the necessity of better accuracy beyond what existing models can provide. Therefore, we investigate the differences between the expected and actual values of the selection pressure induced by several asynchronous update policies, and formally characterize the update dynamics of each variant of the algorithm. We propose new models for these two issues that are shown to outperform in accuracy the existing works.