Epidural anesthesia, despite being a relatively common medical procedure, remains quite demanding in terms of skills as it is mostly blind and thus heavily reliant on the haptic sensations. Although some training support solutions exist, anesthetists consider them mostly inefficient or impractical. A few attempts at creating a simulator for this particular procedure exist but each one lacks one of the important requirements of the procedure. This article introduces a haptic simulator featuring a more complete and realistic simulation of the procedure than we could observe in existing simulators. The simulator is composed of a generic electrical haptic interface coupled with a pneumatic cylinder.

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Interest in multimodal optimization function is expanding rapidly since real-world optimization problems often require the location of multiple optima in the search space. In this context, fitness sharing has been used widely to maintain population diversity and permit the investigation of manly peaks in the feasible domain. This paper reviews various strategies of sharing and proposes new recombination schemes to improve its efficiency. Some empirical results are presented for high and a limited number of fitness function evaluations. Finally, the study compares the sharing method with other niching techniques.