Food-Chain Algorithm And Its Application To Supply-Chain Management

Artificial life as a new developing discipline, it shows enormous vitality in the research of information sciences and life sciences. The research of artificial life will be most contributive to exploring the principle of computation and constructing new-type algorithms. The research ranges of the paper cover artificial life, artificial-life computation, food-chain algorithm, and its application to supply-chain management. The major works are given as follows:(1) Survey of artificial life. Firstly the paper surveys the birth and development of artificial life in detail, and reviews the important international conferences about artificial life, and emphatically introduces the important ideas of artificial life and the theoretical frame of artificial life. Secondly the paper explains the development and application of artificial life, especially in the intelligent optimization algorithms and the emulation fields. In the end, the paper introduces software platforms of the artificial life in the world such as Artificial-Life Environment, multi-agent based Swarm, and Avida.(2) Research of artificial-life computation. The paper studies of the definition of the artificial-life computation, and sums up the theoretical foundations of artificial-life computation including in genetic algorithm, artificial neural network, cellular automata, Lindenmayer system, agent and multi-agent system, and computation ecology. Then the paper preliminarily studies on two kinds of the artificial life algorithm. Artificial-life computation is a new kind of the intelligent optimization algorithms, which uses the forms of Artificial life to study the mechanisms of information expressing and treating of Artificial life, and abstract the corresponding computation models for solving and optimizing the mathematical problems by embedding some kinds of computation technology, and imitating the evolution processes of the natural creatures. Artificial-life computations have the extensive application prospects in the scientific computations and a great deal of the real project applications.(3) Research of the food chain and the food-chain algorithms. The paper studies some important phenomena of ecosystem and focusing in analyzing the food chain, the predator search strategy, the swarm behaviors and swarm intelligences, and the animal domain behaviors, which will enlighten on the research of artificial life. The paper proposes an new kind of improved artificial-life algorithm— food-chain algorithm, and...