Artificial life system and its application to multiple-fuel economic load dispatch problem

This paper presents a distributed algorithm for minimizing a nonconvex multimodal function. In recent years, new distributed algorithms based on an artificial life (A Life) system have been studied and its potential power has been demonstrated. In this paper, therefore, the framework of an ALife system is employed into a function minimization. Since the proposed method utilizes no gradient information, it can be applied to a very wide class of optimization problems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through the practical multi-dimensional problem, the so called multiple-fuel economic load dispatch problem.