A wide number of applications requires classifying or grouping data into a set of categories or
clusters. Most popular clustering techniques to achieve this objective are K-means clustering and
hierarchical clustering. However, both of these methods necessitate the a priori setting of the cluster
number. In this paper, a clustering method based on the use of a niching genetic algorithm is presented,
with the aim of finding the best compromise between the inter-cluster distance maximization and the
intra-cluster distance minimization. This method is applied to three clustering benchmarks and to the
classification of driving missions for railway applications
