Xin Yao's Research Interests: Constraint Handling Techniques and Constrained Optimisation

Constraints appear in many practical problems. I am interested in various constraint handling techniques that are not specific to any one algorithm. At present, I am trying to get a deeper understanding of what penalty methods do in transforming a fitness landscape and how such transformation influences evolutionary search. One of the aims of the research is to explain why penalty methods work well in some cases but not others.

Selected Papers

1. T. P. Runarsson and X. Yao, ``Stochastic Ranking for Constrained Evolutionary Optimization,'' IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 4(3):284-294, September 2000.
   Available as tec311.ps.gz.

2. X. H. Yu, W. X. Zheng, B. L. Wu and X. Yao, ``A novel penalty function approach to constrained optimization problems with genetic algorithms,'' Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence, 2(6):208-213, 1998.