Impacts of Genetic Algorithm Parameters on the Solution Performance for the Uniform Circular Antenna Array Pattern Synthesis Problem

In this paper, the uniform circular antenna array pattern synthesis problem is solved by means of the real coded genetic algorithm (GA). At the same time, the impacts of the mutation rate and the crossover position on the GA performance are also investigated. For this purpose, a circular antenna array with uniformly spaced isotropic elements having identical excitation amplitudes is used as a model. Unlike the conventional GA (with fixed mutation rate and random crossover positions), typical GA implementations with variable mutation rate and restricted crossover position are considered for performance improvement. In conclusion, for the specific problem, decreasing mutation rate with negative derivative is observed to be outperforming the implementations with different mutation rate behaviors. Moreover, regarding the crossover technique, it is observed that imposing some restrictions on the crossover positions (rather than fully random position selection) yields better solutions.