AbstractThis paper deals with a concept of memetic search in agent-based evolutionary computation. In the presented approach, local search is applied during mutation of an agent. Using memetic algorithms causes increased demand on the computing power as the number of fitness function calls increases, therefore careful planning of the fitness computing (through the proposed local search mechanism based on caching parts of the fitness function) leads to significant lowering of this demand. Moreover, applying local search with care, can lead to gradual improvement of the whole population. In the paper the results obtained for selected high-dimensional (5000 dimensions) benchmark functions are presented. Results obtained by the evolutionary and memetic multi-agent systems are compared with classic evolutionary algorithm.