Classical niching methods for multimodal optimization: a brief review

In last two decades population based optimization methods has become widely used since their capability to find good solutions with a low effort by converging to a single global optimum. Many real-world problems are multimodal by nature, being very important to find all optimal solution, may it be local or global ones. Niching methods allow locating multiple solutions since they are capable to maintain the diversity among the individuals on the population. In this work an approach to classical niching methods for multimodal optimization is made. Main drawbacks in such strategies are also discussed while useful topics on the performance analysis of these techniques are presented.