Abstract

Introduction The notion of fitness landscapes has been introduced to describe the dynamics of evolutionary adaptation in nature [40] and has become a powerful concept in evolutionary theory. Fitness landscapes are equally well suited to describe the behavior of heuristic search methods in optimization, since the process of evolution can be thought of as searching a collection of genotypes in order to find the genotype of an organism with highest fitness and thus highest chance of survival. Thinking of a heuristic search method as a strategy to "navigate" in the fitness landscape of a given optimization problem may help in predicting the performance of a heuristic search algorithm if the structure of the landscape is known in advance. Furthermore, the analysis of fitness landscapes may help in designing highly effective search algorithms. In the following we show how the analysis of fitness landscapes of combinatorial optimization problems can aid in designing the components of

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