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For the global optimization problems with continuous variables, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are often used to find the approximate solutions. The number of generations for an EA to find the approximate solutions, called the first hitting time, is an important index to measure the performance of the EA. However, calculating the first hitting time is still difficult in theory. This paper proposes some new drift conditions that are used to estimate the upper bound of the first hitting times of EAs for finding the approximate solutions. Two case studies are given to show how to apply these conditions to estimate the first hitting times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we propose a fast annealing genetic algorithm (FAGA), based on the principle of the minimal free energy in statistical physics, for solving multi-objective optimization problems. The novelties of FAGA are: (1) providing a new fitness assignment strategy by combining Pareto-dominance relation and Gibbs entropy, (2) introducing a new criterion for selection of new individuals to maintain the diversity of the population. We make many experiments to measure the performance of the proposed FAGA, and estimate its convergence rate for a number of test problems. Simulation results show that the FAGA is a very fast and effective algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a new dynamical evolutionary algorithm (DEA) that aims to find the global optimum and give the theoretical explanation from statistical mechanics. The algorithm has been evaluated numerically using a wide set of test functions which are nonlinear, multimodal and multidimensional. The numerical results show that it is possible to obtain global optimum or more accurate solutions than other methods for the investigated hard problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]