OFEC consists of four major components, i.e., problem, algorithm, measurement and utility
- Algorithm calls problem to evaluate solutions, initialize solutions, check solutions’ constraint violations or boundary violations
- Algorithm also calls measurement to calculate and record necessary informations
- Both algorithm, problem and measurement calls utility to help complete their operations.
The template class solution consists of decision variables, objective values, and constraint violation. The encoding of decision variables and the type of objective values are determined by its two template parameters. It can call the bound problem instance to initialize its decision variables or evaluate its objectives and constraint violation.
Derived from the template class solution, the template class individual add an index to label its sequence number in the population.
OFEC also defines the population as a template class, and the only template parameter is the individual type. This template parameter must be classes inherited from the template class individual.
In OFEC, combinatorial problems are directly inherited from the base class problem, while most continuous problems in the platform are inherited from problem’s derived class continuous. Benchmark functions frequently transformed and used by composition problem have a common base class function, which is also derived from class continuous.
All algorithm objects in OFEC must be defined as classes inherited from the base class algorithm. A single solution algorithm such as simulated annealing should own a solution class as data member, while population-based EAs should own the corresponding population class as data member.
The performance of an evolutionary algorithm is usually measured as the average of its multiple runs. In OFEC, these tasks are run in parallel to take full advantage of the performance of the hardware platform. To achieve this goal, algorithm, problem and several common probability distributions (e.g.,uniform, normal, and cauchy) are wrapped as members of the local thread class global.