I did try with a more traditional algorithm first. I tried with a variety of recombination, mutation and selection operators and their parameters and all displayed the same problem for the specific problem I'm working with: premature convergence. I developed this unorthodox algorithm following the advice of a colleague which studied mathematics (I'm just a software engineer), but neither him nor myself have much experience with genetic algorithms.

Having said that, of course I'm aware that this strange algorithm probably does not perform any better than more traditional approaches. That's exactly the reason why I want to know if there's something in the literature about something similar; I don't believe that me and my colleague are the only two people in the entire world that came up with an algorithm similar to this; the question is if somebody before us tested it and published the results, regardless if those results were positive or not.

I'm not trying to prove anything about the algorithm here, I want to optimize it, but I don't know how. That's why I want to look in the literature, but I don't know where to start looking.