Estratégias de busca no projeto evolucionista de circuitos combinacionais

Abstract

Evolutionary computation has been applied in several areas of knowledge for discovering Innovative designs. When applied to a digital circuit design the scalability problem has limited the obtaining of complex circuits, being pointed as the main problem in the evolvable hardware field. Increased power of evolutionary methods and efficiency of the search constitute an important step towards improving the design tool. This work approaches the evolutionary computation applied to the design of combinational logic circuits and createsstrategiestoimprovetheperformanceofevolutionaryalgorithms. The three main contributions result from this thesis are: (i) the developement of a methodology that helps to understand the success/failure of the genetic modifications that occur along the evolution; (ii) a heuristic proposed for seeding the initial population; the results showed there is a correlation between the topology of the initial population and the region of the search space which is explored. (iii) a proposal of a new mutation operator referred to as Biased SAM; it is verified that this operator can guide the search. In the experiments performed the mutation proposed is better than or equivalent to the traditional mutation. The computational experiments that prove the efficiency of the respective contributions were made using benchmark circuits of the literature.