Stop Criterion

The part of the genetic algorithm that takes up most of the time is the evaluation of the fitness function. The number of evaluations of the fitness in each generation depends on the operators used and the population update model. Different operators and update models can lead to very different numbers of evaluations per generation. That is the reason why it is common to use the number of evaluations as the stop criterion instead of the number of generations. We have used a limit of 300,000 evaluations [Evv98,dK98] as stop criterion. The precision of the solutions is bounded by the precision of the data type used in the implementation of the genetic algorithm. We have used a double precision data type of 64 bits following the specification ANSI/IEEE STD 754-1985 (IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic). This data type has a precision of 15 - 17 digits.