Fast Contiguous Somatic Hypermutations for Single-Objective Optimisation and Multi-Objective Optimisation Via Decomposition

Somatic Contiguous Hypermutations (CHM) are a popular variation operator used in artificial immune systems for optimisation tasks. Theoretical studies have shown that CHM operators can lead to considerable speed-ups in the expected optimisation time compared to the traditional standard bit mutation (SBM) operators used in evolutionary computation for both single-objective and multi-objective problems where it is advantageous to mutate large contiguous areas of the genotype representing the candidate solutions. These speed-ups can make the difference between polynomial and exponential runtimes, but come at the expense of the CHM operator being considerably slower than the SBM operator in easy hillclimbing phases of the optimisation process, when small areas of the genotype have to be mutated for progress to be made. In this paper we present a Fast CHM operator that is asymptotically just as fast as traditional SBM for hillclimbing yet maintains the efficacy of the standard CHM operator when large jumps in the search space are required to make progress efficiently. We demonstrate such efficacy on all applications where CHM has been previously studied in the literature.