Modeling an agrifood industrial process using cooperative coevolution Algorithms

Abstract : This report presents two experiments related to the modeling of an industrial agrifood process using evolutionary techniques. Experiments have been focussed on a specific problem which is the modeling of a Camembert-cheese ripening process. Two elated complex optimisation problems have been considered: -- a deterministic modeling problem, the phase prediction roblem, for which a search for a closed form tree expression has been performed using genetic programming (GP), -- a Bayesian network structure estimation problem, considered as a two-stage problem, i.e. searching first for an approximation of an independence model using EA, and then deducing, via a deterministic algorithm, a Bayesian network which represents the equivalence class of the independence model found at the first stage. In both of these problems, cooperative-coevolution techniques (also called ``Parisian'' approaches) have been proved successful. These approaches actually allow to represent the searched solution as an aggregation of several individuals (or even as a whole population), as each individual only bears a part of the searched solution. This scheme allows to use the artificial Darwinism principles in a more economic way, and the gain in terms of robustness and efficiency is important.