The aim of this paper is to give a survey on the development and applications of evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS). The paper starts with a general introduction describing the background, structure and behaviour of EMAS. EMAS application to solving global optimisation problems is presented in the next section along with its modification targeted at lowering the computation costs by early removing certain agents based on immunological inspirations. Subsequent sections deal with the elitist variant of EMAS aimed at solving multi-criteria optimisation problems, and the co-evolutionary one aimed at solving multi-modal optimisation problems. Each variation of EMAS is illustrated with selected experimental results.

Abstract. An immunological selection mechanism for evolutionary multi-agent systems is discussed in the paper. It allows for reducing the number of fitness assignments required to get the solution of comparable quality as the classical resource-based selection in EMAS. Experimental studies aim at comparing the performance of immune-inspired selection, with resource-based one, and also with classical parallel evolutionary algorithms, based on typical multi-modal optimization benchmarks.

An optimization of power and energy consumptions is the important concern for a design of modern-day and future computing and communication systems. Various techniques and high performance technologies have been investigated and developed for an efficient management of such systems. All these technologies should be able to provide good performance and to cope under an increased workload demand in the dynamic environments such as Computational Grids (CGs), clusters and clouds. In this paper we approach the independent batch scheduling in CG as a bi-objective minimization problem with makespan and energy consumption as the scheduling criteria. We use the Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) methodology for scaling and possible reduction of cumulative power energy utilized by the system resources. We develop two implementations of Hierarchical Genetic Strategy-based grid scheduler (Green-HGS-Sched) with elitist and struggle replacement mechanisms. The proposed algorithms were empirically evaluated versus single-population Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and Island GA models for four CG size scenarios in static and dynamic modes. The simulation results show that proposed scheduling methodologies fairly reduce the energy usage and can be easily adapted to the dynamically changing grid states and various scheduling scenarios.

Abstract. The paper introduces a stochastic model for a class of population-based global optimization meta-heuristics, that generalizes existing models in the following ways. First of all, an individual becomes an active software agent characterized by the constant genotype and the meme that may change during the optimization process. Second, the model embraces the asynchronous processing of agent's actions. Third, we consider a vast variety of possible actions that include the conventional mixing operations (e.g. mutation, cloning, crossover) as well as migrations among demes and local optimization methods. Despite the fact that the model fits many popular algorithms and strategies (e.g. genetic algorithms with tournament selection) it is mainly devoted to study memetic algorithms.The model is composed of two parts: EMAS architecture (data structures and management strategies) allowing to define the space of states and the framework for stochastic agent actions and the stationary Markov chain described in terms of this architecture. The probability transition function has been obtained and the Markov kernels for sample actions have been computed.The obtained theoretical results are helpful for studying metaheuristics conforming to the EMAS architecture. The designed synchronization allows the safe, coarse-grained parallel implementation and its effective, sub-optimal scheduling in a distributed computer environment. The proved strong ergodicity of the finite state Markov chain results in the asymptotic stochastic guarantee of success, which in turn imposes the liveness of a studied metaheuristic. The Markov chain delivers the sampling measure at an arbitrary step of computations, which allows further asymptotic studies, e.g. on various kinds of the stochastic convergence.

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