Optical coating designs using the family competition evolutionary algorithm.

A robust evolutionary approach, called the Family Competition Evolutionary Algorithm (FCEA), is described for the synthesis of optical thin-film designs. Based on family competition and adaptive rules, the proposed approach consists of global and local strategies by integrating decreasing mutations and self-adaptive mutations. The method is applied to three different optical coating designs with complex spectral quantities. Numerical results indicate that the proposed approach performs very robustly and is very competitive with other approaches.