The aim of this paper is to present the historical background of artificial life based stochastic optimization algorithms from the viewpoint of Neumann’s Self-reproduction scheme. The theory of evolutionary and swarm optimization are overviewed and compared from this viewpoint. A detailed application example is given to demonstrate how these tools can be applied to solve process optimization pr...

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), a famous problem of operation research, holds a central place in combinatorial optimization problems. In this problem, a fleet vehicles with Q capacity start to move from depot and return after servicing to customers in which visit only ones each customer and load more than its capacity not at all. The objective is to minimize the number of used vehicles and t...

Problem optimization in dynamic environments has atrracted a growing interest from the evolutionary computation community in reccent years due to its importance in real world optimization problems. Several approaches have been developed to enhance the performance of evolutionary algorithms for dynamic optimization problems, of which the memory scheme is a major one. This chapter investigates th...

Sexual selection mechanism can be used in evolutionary algorithms in order to introduce and maintain useful population diversity. In this paper the sexual selection mechanism for agent-based evolutionary algorithms is presented. Proposed co-evolutionary multi-agent system with sexual selection is applied to multi-modal optimization problems and compared to “classical” evolutionary algorithms.