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Title: Enhancing pattern recognition using evolutionary computation for feature selection and extraction with application to the biochemistry of protein-water binding
Creator: Raymer, Michael L.
Date: 2000
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Design automation of mechatronic systems using evolutionary computation and bond graph
Creator: Fan, Zhun
Date: 2004
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Achieving consistent evolution across isometrically equivalent search spaces
Creator: Patton, Arnold L.
Date: 2004
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Sustainable evolutionary algorithms and scalable evolutionary synthesis of dynamic systems
Creator: Hu, Jianjun
Date: 2004
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Using evolutionary computation to automatically refractor software designs to include design patterns
Creator: Jensen, Adam C.
Date: 2010
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Evolving artificial neural networks with generative encodings inspired by developmental biology
Creator: Clune, Jeff
Date: 2010
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Natural niching : applying ecological principles to evolutionary computation
Creator: Goings, Sherri
Date: 2010
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Evolution of distributed behavior
Creator: Knoester, David B.
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In this dissertation, we describe a study in the evolution of distributed behavior, where evolutionary algorithms are used to discover behaviors for distributed computing systems. We define distributed behavior as that in which groups of individuals must both cooperate in working towards a common goal and coordinate their activities in a harmonious fashion. As such, communication among individuals is necessarily a key component of distributed behavior, and we have identified three classes of...
Show moreIn this dissertation, we describe a study in the evolution of distributed behavior, where evolutionary algorithms are used to discover behaviors for distributed computing systems. We define distributed behavior as that in which groups of individuals must both cooperate in working towards a common goal and coordinate their activities in a harmonious fashion. As such, communication among individuals is necessarily a key component of distributed behavior, and we have identified three classes of distributed behavior that require communication: data-driven behaviors, where semantically meaningful data is transmitted between individuals; temporal behaviors, which are based on the relative timing of individuals' actions; and structural behaviors, which are responsible for maintaining the underlying communication network connecting individuals. Our results demonstrate that evolutionary algorithms can discover groups of individuals that exhibit each of these different classes of distributed behavior, and that these behaviors can be discovered both in isolation (e.g., evolving a purely data-driven algorithm) and in concert (e.g., evolving an algorithm that includes both data-driven and structural behaviors). As part of this research, we show that evolutionary algorithms can discover novel heuristics for distributed computing, and hint at a new class of distributed algorithm enabled by such studies.The majority of this research was conducted with the Avida platform for digital evolution, a system that has been proven to aid researchers in understanding the biological process of evolution by natural selection. For this reason, the results presented in this dissertation provide the foundation for future studies that examine how distributed behaviors evolved in nature. The close relationship between evolutionary biology and evolutionary algorithms thus aids our study of evolving algorithms for the next generation of distributed computing systems.
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Title: Applying evolutionary computation techniques to address environmental uncertainty in dynamically adaptive systems
Creator: Ramirez, Andres J.
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: A dynamically adaptive system (DAS) observes itself and its execution environment at run time to detect conditions that warrant adaptation. If an adaptation is necessary, then a DAS changes its structure and/or behavior to continuously satisfy its requirements, even as its environment changes. It is challenging, however, to systematically and rigorously develop a DAS due to environmental uncertainty. In particular, it is often infeasible for a human to identify all possible combinations of...
Show moreA dynamically adaptive system (DAS) observes itself and its execution environment at run time to detect conditions that warrant adaptation. If an adaptation is necessary, then a DAS changes its structure and/or behavior to continuously satisfy its requirements, even as its environment changes. It is challenging, however, to systematically and rigorously develop a DAS due to environmental uncertainty. In particular, it is often infeasible for a human to identify all possible combinations of system and environmental conditions that a DAS might encounter throughout its lifetime. Nevertheless, a DAS must continuously satisfy its requirements despite the threat that this uncertainty poses to its adaptation capabilities. This dissertation proposes a model-based framework that supports the specification, monitoring, and dynamic reconfiguration of a DAS to explicitly address uncertainty. The proposed framework uses goal-oriented requirements models and evolutionary computation techniques to derive and fine-tune utility functions for requirements monitoring in a DAS, identify combinations of system and environmental conditions that adversely affect the behavior of a DAS, and generate adaptations on-demand to transition the DAS to a target system configuration while preserving system consistency. We demonstrate the capabilities of our model-based framework by applying it to an industrial case study involving a remote data mirroring network that efficiently distributes data even as network links fail and messages are dropped, corrupted, and delayed.
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Title: Harnessing evolutionary computation for the design and generation of adaptive embedded controllers within the context of uncertainty
Creator: Byers, Chad Michael
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: A critical challenge for the design of embedded controllers is incorporating desirable qualities such as robustness, fault tolerance, and adaptability into the control process in order to respond to dynamic environmental conditions. An embedded controller governs the execution of a task-specific system by monitoring information from its environment via sensors and producing an appropriate response through the system's actuators, often independent of any supervisory control. For a human...
Show moreA critical challenge for the design of embedded controllers is incorporating desirable qualities such as robustness, fault tolerance, and adaptability into the control process in order to respond to dynamic environmental conditions. An embedded controller governs the execution of a task-specific system by monitoring information from its environment via sensors and producing an appropriate response through the system's actuators, often independent of any supervisory control. For a human developer, identifying the set of all possible combinations of conditions a system might experience and designing a solution to accommodate this set is burdensome, costly, and often, infeasible. To alleviate this burden, a variety of techniques have been explored to automate the generation of embedded controller solutions. In this dissertation, we focus on the bio-inspired technique referred to as evolutionary computation where we harness evolution's power as a population-based, global search technique to build up good behavioral components. In this way, evolution naturally selects for these desirable qualities in order for a solution to remain competitive over time in the population. Often, these search techniques operate in the context of uncertainty where aspects of the (1) problem domain, (2) solution space, and (3) search process itself are subject to variation and change. To mitigate issues associated with uncertainty in the problem domain, we propose the digital enzyme, a biologically-inspired model that maps the complexity of both the environment and the system into the space of values rather than instructions. To address uncertainty in the solution space, we remove constraints in our initial digital enzyme model to allow the genome structure to be dynamic and open-ended, accommodating a wider range of evolved solution designs. Finally, to help explore the inherent uncertainty that exists in the search process, we uncover a hidden feature interaction present between the diversity-preserving search operator of a popular evolutionary algorithm and propose a new way to use niching as a means to mitigate its unwanted effects and bias on search.
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Title: Elucidating the evolutionary origins of collective animal behavior
Creator: Olson, Randal S.
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Despite over a century of research, the evolutionary origins of collective animal behavior remain unclear. Dozens of hypotheses explaining the evolution of collective behavior have risen and fallen in the past century, but until recently it has been difficult to perform controlled behavioral evolution experiments to isolate these various hypotheses and test their individual effects. In this dissertation, I outline a relatively new method using digital models of evolution to perform controlled...
Show moreDespite over a century of research, the evolutionary origins of collective animal behavior remain unclear. Dozens of hypotheses explaining the evolution of collective behavior have risen and fallen in the past century, but until recently it has been difficult to perform controlled behavioral evolution experiments to isolate these various hypotheses and test their individual effects. In this dissertation, I outline a relatively new method using digital models of evolution to perform controlled behavioral evolution experiments. In particular, I use these models to directly explore the evolutionary consequence of the selfish herd, predator confusion, and the many eyes hypotheses, and demonstrate how the models can lend key insights useful to behavioral biologists, computer scientists, and robotics researchers. This dissertation lays the groundwork for the experimental study of the hypotheses surrounding the evolution of collective animal behavior, and establishes a path for future experiments to explore and disentangle how the various hypothesized benefits of collective behavior interact over evolutionary time.
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Title: An agent model of vertical integration in telecommunications and content
Creator: Koning, Kendall Jay
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "This dissertation explores several important telecommunications policy issues in light of recent developments in the wireline broadband and online video markets." -- Abstract.

Title: Using evolutionary approach to optimize and model multi-scenario, multi-objective fault-tolerant problems
Creator: Zhu, Ling (Engineer)
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Fault-tolerant design involves different scenarios, such as scenarios with no fault in the system, with faults occurring randomly, with different operation conditions, and with different loading conditions. For each scenario, there can be multiple requirements (objectives). To assess the performance of a design (solution), it needs to be evaluated over a number of different scenarios containing various requirements in each scenario. We consider this problem as a multi-scenario, multi...
Show moreFault-tolerant design involves different scenarios, such as scenarios with no fault in the system, with faults occurring randomly, with different operation conditions, and with different loading conditions. For each scenario, there can be multiple requirements (objectives). To assess the performance of a design (solution), it needs to be evaluated over a number of different scenarios containing various requirements in each scenario. We consider this problem as a multi-scenario, multi-objective (MSMO) problem.Despite its practical importance and prevalence in engineering application, there are not many studies which systematically solve the MSMO problem. In this dissertation, we focus on optimizing and modeling MSMO problems, and propose various approaches to solve different types of MSMO optimization problems, especially multi-objective fault-tolerant problems. We classify MSMO optimization problem into two categories: scenario-dependent and scenario-independent. For the scenario-dependent MSMO problem, we review existing methodologies and suggest two evolutionary-based methods for handling multiple scenarios and objectives: aggregated method and integrated method. The effectiveness of both methods are demonstrated on several case studies including numerical problems and engineering design problems. The engineering problems include cantilever-type welded beam design, truss bridge design, four-bar truss design. The experimental results show that both methods can find a set of widely distributed solutions that are compromised among the respective objective values under all scenarios. We also model fault-tolerant programs using the aggregated method. We synthesize three fault-tolerant distributed programs: Byzantine agreement program, token ring circulation program and consensus program with failure detector $S$. The results show that evolutionary-base MSMO approach, as a generic method, can effectively model fault-tolerant programs. For the scenario-independent MSMO problem, we apply evolutionary multi-objective approach. As a case study, we optimize a probabilistic self-stabilizing program, a special type of fault-tolerant program, and obtain several interesting counter-intuitive observations under different scenarios.
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Title: On the constructive power of ecology in open-ended evolving systems
Creator: Dolson, Emily L.
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "Ecology is a powerful force for unlocking the full potential of evolution. Ecological interactions create feedback loops that promote diversification, both in natural ecosystems and in more applied evolutionary computation frameworks. However, we currently lack a strong theoretical framework that predicts how a given ecological community will evolve. Such a framework would allow us to better understand and anticipate change in evolving systems and facilitate the harnessing of ecology as a...
Show more"Ecology is a powerful force for unlocking the full potential of evolution. Ecological interactions create feedback loops that promote diversification, both in natural ecosystems and in more applied evolutionary computation frameworks. However, we currently lack a strong theoretical framework that predicts how a given ecological community will evolve. Such a framework would allow us to better understand and anticipate change in evolving systems and facilitate the harnessing of ecology as a tool for guiding evolution. In this work, I develop tools to begin the development of such theory in computational systems. Using these tools, I show that different mechanisms for creating ecology (e.g. spatial structure and varied competition schemes) produce radically different community structures and evolutionary outcomes. I explore the implications of these differences in the context of evolutionary computation and biology."--Page ii.
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