“…ECs have been successfully adopted to solve the IPPS problem, as proven by the growing number of papers on the topic. Examples include GAs [48,35,32,34,58,55,40,39,71,72,60,10,67], Symbolic Evolutionary Algorithms (SEAs) [31,30], and hybrid approaches of EC [37,1,49]. However, the current encoding strategies for the IPPS problem reported in the literature make almost all the classic genetic operators inapplicable due to the fact that a vast of offspring will be infeasible or illegal.…”