Evolutionary Multi-Agent Systems in Non-Stationary Environments

In the article the performance of an evolutionary multi-agent system in  dynamic optimization is evaluated in comparison to classical evolutionary  algorithms.  The starting point is a general introduction describing the  background, structure and behaviour of EMAS against classical  evolutionary techniques.  Then the properties of energy-based selection  are investigated to show how it may influence the diversity of the  population in EMAS.  The considerations are illustrated by experimental  results based on the dynamic version of the well-known, high-dimensional Rastrigin function  benchmark

A multi-agent based evolutionary algorithm in non-stationary environments

This article is posted here with permission of IEEE - Copyright @ 2008 IEEEIn this paper, a multi-agent based evolutionary algorithm (MAEA) is introduced to solve dynamic optimization problems. The agents simulate living organism features and co-evolve to find optimum. All agents live in a lattice like environment, where each agent is fixed on a lattice point. In order to increase the energy, agents can compete with their neighbors and can also acquire knowledge based on statistic information. In order to maintain the diversity of the population, the random immigrants and adaptive primal dual mapping schemes are used. Simulation experiments on a set of dynamic benchmark problems show that MAEA can obtain a better performance in non-stationary environments in comparison with several peer genetic algorithms.This work was suported by the Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 70431003, the Science Fund for Creative Research Group of the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60521003, the National Science and Technology Support Plan of China under Grant No. 2006BAH02A09, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the United Kingdom under Grant No. EP/E060722/1

Evolutionary Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning

There are two distinct approaches to solving reinforcement learning problems, namely, searching in value function space and searching in policy space. Temporal difference methods and evolutionary algorithms are well-known examples of these approaches. Kaelbling, Littman and Moore recently provided an informative survey of temporal difference methods. This article focuses on the application of evolutionary algorithms to the reinforcement learning problem, emphasizing alternative policy representations, credit assignment methods, and problem-specific genetic operators. Strengths and weaknesses of the evolutionary approach to reinforcement learning are presented, along with a survey of representative applications

Learning in evolutionary environments

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