s: Jan. 1992 -- Dec. 1994 ffl CTI: Current Technology Index Jan./Feb. 1993 -- Jan./Feb. 1994 ffl DAI: Dissertation Abstracts International: Vol. 53 No. 1 -- Vol. 55 No. 4 (1994) ffl EEA: Electrical & Electronics Abstracts: Jan. 1991 -- Dec. 1994 ffl P: Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings: Jan. 1986 -- Feb. 1995 (except Nov. 1994) ffl EI A: The Engineering Index Annual: 1987 -- 1992 ffl EI M: The Engineering Index Monthly: Jan. 1993 -- Dec. 1994 The following GA researchers have already kindly supplied their complete autobibliographies and/or proofread references to their papers: Dan Adler, Patrick Argos, Jarmo T. Alander, James E. Baker, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Ralf Bruns, I. L. Bukatova, Thomas Back, Yuval Davidor, Dipankar Dasgupta, Marco Dorigo, Bogdan Filipic, Terence C. Fogarty, David B. Fogel, Toshio Fukuda, Hugo de Garis, Robert C. Glen, David E. Goldberg, Martina Gorges-Schleuter, Jeffrey Horn, Aristides T. Hatjimihail, Mark J. Jakiela, Richard S. Judson, Akihiko Konaga...

. The generation of a high quality layout during the design of a VLSI microchip is a very complex combinatorial optimization problem. Components of a circuit have to be placed, and signal nets have to be routed on an overall minimal area. In this paper a parallel Genetic Algorithm for the combined optimization of placement and routing is presented. The main focus is on the self-adaptation of the search process: Several islands execute a sequential GA with different strategies. At fixed intervals these strategies are ranked and each strategy is adjusted to the next better one by assimilating its characteristical parameters. 1 Introduction One strength of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) is their robustness, which mainly is caused by the fact that they deal with a sample of candidate solutions to an optimization problem at a time, and that these solutions are encoded in a problem independent representation. In most cases this genotype coding is a string (chromosome) of elementary data-types, pr...

of the work presented in this thesis has been previously published as listed below. Although some of these papers have co-authors, the work appearing in this thesis is entirely my own, with the exception of parts of chapter 3, which presents work jointly carried out by myself and Adrian Thompson. The respective contributions to this work will be explicitly stated at the beginning of the chapter. List of Previous Publications Kuntz, P., Layzell, P., & Snyers, D. (1997). A Colony of Ant-like Agents for Partitioning

. This paper describes an evolutionary search method known as the genetic algorithm (GA) and examines its application to real-world design problems. A description of the algorithm itself and its history is provided. A general review of GA theory and analysis is given, and many of the newer, more advanced types of GA are introduced. Some of the hundreds of different design applications tackled by GAs are then described. Two more detailed case-studies are included, to outline how GAs can be applied to real-world applications, and to illustrate some of the difficulties such problems present to the designers of GA-based systems. The paper concludes that the GA is a highly significant and useful tool, suitable for a variety of different design applications. 1 Introduction In Computer Science, search algorithms define a computational problem in terms of search, where the searchspace is a space filled with all possible solutions to the problem, and a point in that space defines a solution (Ka...