Building Software Frameworks for Evolutionary Computation

As the software industry matures, the design and implementation of individual software components that can be assembled to form an application is gaining popularity as a method of software development. This is because component-level design shortens development time, increases maintainability, and results in a more flexible software product. The domain of evolutionary computation encompasses a wide and diversified set of algorithms. Some of these algorithms serve the same propose, but are better suited to particular domains. As evolutionary computation gains viability as a means for investigating complex problems, it would benefit from the application of component software design to build frameworks that are flexible enough to support customization, and fundamental enough to support reuse. In this paper, fundamental concepts in component software design are considered and applied to a simple evolutionary computation framework.