What is Multimodal Problems

Traditionally, the Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques, and more specifically the Genetic Algorithms (GAs) (Goldberg & Wang, 1989), have proved to be efficient when solving various problems; however, as a possible lack, the GAs tend to provide a unique solution for the problem on which they are applied. Some non global solutions discarded during the search of the best one could be acceptable under certain circumstances. The majority of the problems at the real world involve a search space with one or more global solutions and multiple local solutions; this means that they are multimodal problems (Harik, 1995) and therefore, if it is desired to obtain multiple solutions by using GAs, it would be necessary to modify their classic functioning outline for adapting them correctly to the multimodality of such problems.