Have you ever used a genetic algorithm in real-world applications?

Question

I was wondering how common it is to find genetic algorithm approaches in commercial code.

It always seemed to me that some kinds of schedulers could benefit from a GA engine, as a supplement to the main algorithm.

Answer 1

Genetic Algorithms have been widely used commercially. Optimizing train routing was an early application. More recently fighter planes have used GAs to optimize wing designs. I have used GAs extensively at work to generate solutions to problems that have an extremely large search space.

Many problems are unlikely to benefit from GAs. I disagree with Thomas that they are too hard to understand. A GA is actually very simple. We found that there is a huge amount of knowledge to be gained from optimizing the GA to a particular problem that might be difficult and as always managing large amounts of parallel computation continue to be a problem for many programmers.

A problem that would benefit from a GA is going to have the following characteristics:

• A good way to encode potential solutions
• A way to compute an a numerical score to evaluate the quality of the solution
• A large multi-dimensional search space where the answer is non-obvious
• A good solution is good enough and a perfect solution is not required

There are many problems that could probably benefit from GAs and in the future they will probably be more widely deployed. I believe that GAs are used in cutting edge engineering more than people think however most people (like my company does) guards those secrets extremely closely. It is only long after the fact that it is revealed that GAs were used.

Most people that deal with "normal" applications probably don't have much use for them though.

Answer 2

If you want to find an example, look at Postgres's Query Planner. It uses many techniques, and one just so happens to be genetic.

http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/geqo-pg-intro.html