Search-based software engineering, a discipline that often requires finding optimal solutions, can be a viable source for problems that bridge theory and practice of evolutionary computation. In this research we consider one such problem: generation of data connections in a distributed control application designed according to the IEC 61499 industry standard.

We perform the analysis of the fitness landscape of this problem and find why exactly the simplistic (1 + 1) evolutionary algorithm is slower than expected when finding an optimal solution to this problem. To counteract, we develop a population-based algorithm that explicitly maximises diversity among the individuals in the population. We show that this measure indeed helps to improve the running times