Abstract
This communication considers the synthesis of interleaved antenna arrays with shared and inactive elements. A hybrid genetic algorithm (GA) where the initial population is seeded with good solutions is proposed. A number of seeding schemes are considered and the most effective of these are identified. The proposed algorithm is shown to reliably produce results with sidelobe level (SLL) values which are close to the optimum and to converge faster than the other algorithms considered. However, some of the seeding schemes mislead the GA and actually produce worse results than random initialization.