An Artificial Life Environment to Control Complex Processes: An Industrial Application for Energy Production Plants

This paper describes the use of evolutionary methods inspired by artificial life environments for the development of solutions connected to combustion problems based on the evolutionary properties. The idea proposed in this paper is aimed to d eveloping a new approach to the optimisation and control of complex p rocesses for energy production/consumption. This methodology is based on evolutionary op timisation and it started from some successful experiences in the dynamic characterisation (for diagnostics and control) for at least two industrial applications (oil field diagnostics and combustion dynamic characterisation). Furthermore a n op timisation study has s hown v ery interesting features of artificial life environments. The basic features of the proposed approach are: • dynamics based • no intensive modelling (progressive training directly from the measurements) • able to follow the plant evolution The essence of this approach could be synthesised by the following sentence: &...