Random Key chromosome is used for permutation representation. It is a vector of a fixed length of real numbers in [0,1] interval. The index of the i-th smallest value in the vector represents an i-th member of the permutation.
For example, the random key [0.2, 0.3, 0.8, 0.1] corresponds to the permutation of indices (3,0,1,2). If the original (unpermuted) sequence would be (a,b,c,d), this would mean the sequence (d,a,b,c).
With this representation, common operators like n-point crossover can be used, because any such chromosome represents a valid permutation.
Since the chromosome (and thus its arrayRepresentation) is immutable, the array representation is sorted only once in the constructor.
For details, see:
- Bean, J.C.: Genetic algorithms and random keys for sequencing and optimization. ORSA Journal on Computing 6 (1994) 154-160
- Rothlauf, F.: Representations for Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms. Volume 104 of Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing. Physica-Verlag, Heidelberg (2002)
@param < T> type of the permuted objects
@since 2.0