EASY-IEC MATLAB Toolbox

Interactive Evolutionary Computing

In some real-life optimization problems the objectives are often non-commensurable and are explicitly/mathematically not available.

Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) can effectively handle these problems.

IEC uses human evaluation in the optimization system. Simply stated, IEC is a technique from the class of evolutionary algorithms (EAs), whose fitness function is replaced by a human. As in interactive evolution, the user selects one or more individual(s) which survive(s) and reproduce(s) (with variation) to constitute a new generation, IEC uses two different spaces for its search. Thehuman user evaluates the output of the target system according to the distance between the target goal and the system output in psychological space. On the other hand, the EA searches in the parameter space. It can be said that the IEC is the optimization technology where the EA and a human search are cooperatively based on the mapping between these two spaces.

This approach has been implemented in this Easy-IEC Toolbox, which can be downloaded in two different versions.

In the first version the Easy-IEC Toolbox (example1.zip) is and applied to the design of a controller of an exothermic reactor (CSTR). The results show that IEC is an efficient and comfortable method to incorporate the priori knowledge of the user into a user-guided identification of complex systems. In this version, the user can only select some individuals used to form the next generation.

In the second version of the Easy-IEC Toolbox (example2.zip), IEC is applied to the design of a temperature profile of beer fermentation process. The results show that IEC is an efficient and comfortable method to incorporate the priori knowledge of the user into the model based optimization of batch processes. In this version the user can manually modify the individuals with the use of interactive plots.

Three recently submitted papers about the application of this toolbox are also available from here: WSC8, IASTED-AIA, Comp&ChemEng.

Html help of the EASY-IEC Matlab^® Toolbox

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