Open AccessIn recent decades, evolutionary algorithms have proven themselves as the powerful optimization techniques of search engine. Their popularity is due to the fact that they are easy to implement and can be used in all areas, since they are based on the idea of universal evolution. For example, in the problems of a large number of local optima, the traditional optimization methods, usually, fail in finding the global optimum. To solve such problems using a variety of stochastic methods, in particular, the so-called population-based algorithms, which are a kind of evolutionary methods. The main disadvantage of this class of methods is their slow convergence to the exact solution in the neighborhood of the global optimum, as these methods incapable to use the local information about the landscape of the function. This often limits their use in largescale real-world problems where the computation time is a critical factor.
One of the promising directions in the field of modern evolutionary computation are memetic algorithms, which can be regarded as a combination of population search of the global optimum and local procedures for verifying solutions, which gives a synergistic effect. In the context of memetic algorithms, the meme is an implementation of the local optimization method to refine solution in the search.
The concept of memetic algorithms provides ample opportunities for the development of various modifications of these algorithms, which can vary the frequency of the local search, the conditions of its end, and so on. The practically significant memetic algorithm modifications involve the simultaneous use of different memes. Such algorithms are called multi-memetic.
The paper gives statement of the global problem of nonlinear unconstrained optimization, describes the most promising areas of AI modifications, including hybridization and metaoptimization. The main content of the work is the classification and review of existing varieties of memetic algorithms.
The results show that, despite the successful application of various memetic algorithms in various applications, there are a large number of directions for their modification and study. These are, for example, a more detailed study of self-adaptation methods of memetic algorithms, development of methods to assess the meme ability to refine the solution at a particular stage of the working algorithm. Besides the problem of selecting memes, there are also problems associated with the duration of local search. The solution is a balance of computing time between the local and global search. For a fixed computing time it allows to allocate time between global and local search in the solution of the optimization problem, which will increase the efficiency of the algorithms.