Design of Large Thinned Arrays Using Different Biogeography-Based Optimization Migration Models

Array thinning is a common discrete-valued combinatorial optimization problem. Evolutionary algorithms are suitable techniques for above-mentioned problem. Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO), which is inspired by the science of biogeography, is a stochastic population-based evolutionary algorithm (EA). The original BBO uses a linear migration model to describe how species migrate from one island to another. Other nonlinear migration models have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we apply BBO with four different migration models to five different large array design cases. Additionally we compare results with five other popular algorithms. The problems dimensions range from 150 to 300. The results show that BBO with sinusoidal migration model generally performs better than the other algorithms. However, these results are considered to be indicative and do not generally apply to all optimization problems in antenna design.