Parallelizing evolutionary computation: A mobile agent-based approach

Parallel computation models have been widely used to enhance the performance of traditional evolutionary algorithms, and they have been implemented on parallel computers to speed up the computation. Instead of using expensive parallel computing facilities, we propose to implement parallel evolutionary computation models on easily available networked PCs, and present a multi-agent framework to support parallelism. With the unique characteristics of agent autonomy and mobility, mobile agents cam carry the EC-code and migrate from machine to machine to complete the computation dynamically. To evaluate the proposed approach we have developed a prototype system on a middleware platform JADE to solve a time-consuming task. Different kinds of experiments have been conducted to assess the developed system and the preliminary results show the promise and efficiency of our mobile agent-based approach. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.