  The longest arc-preserving common subsequence problem is an NP-hard
combinatorial optimization problem from the field of computational biology.
This problem finds applications, in particular, in the comparison of
arc-annotated Ribonucleic acid (RNA) sequences. In this work we propose a
simple, hybrid evolutionary algorithm to tackle this problem. The most
important feature of this algorithm concerns a crossover operator based on
solution merging. In solution merging, two or more solutions to the problem are
merged, and an exact technique is used to find the best solution within this
union. It is experimentally shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms a
heuristic from the literature.
