In this paper, we develop an adaptive genetic algorithm (aGA). The aGA has an adaptive scheme which can automatically determine the use of local search technique and adaptively regulate the rates of crossover and mutation operations during its search process. For the adaptive scheme, the ratio of degree of dispersion resulting from the various fitness values of the populations at continuous two generations is considered. For the local search technique, an improved iterative hill climbing method is used and incorporated into genetic algorithm (GA) loop. In order to demonstrate the efficiency of the aGA, i) a canonical GA without any adaptive scheme and ii) several conventional aGAs with various adaptive schemes are also presented. These algorithms, including the aGA, are tested and analyzed each other using various test problems. Numerical results by various measures of performance show that the proposed aGA outperforms the conventional algorithms.