Morphing methods in evolutionary design optimization

Design optimization is a well established application field of evolutionary computation. However, standard recombination operators acting on the genotypic representation of the design or shape are often too disruptive to be useful during optimization. In this work, we will analyze whether morphing methods between two shapes can be used as recombination operators acting on the phenotype space, thus directly on the shape or design. We introduce three different morphing methods and employ them as recombination operators in a standard evolution strategy (es). We compare their performance with an evolution strategy without any recombination operators on two target shape approximation problem. We can conclude that two of the three morphing methods can be useful during search although all morphing methods still turn out to hinder the self-adaptation of the step sizes of the evolution strategy.