title: Evolutionary development of tensegrity structures.
abstract: Contributions from the emerging fields of molecular genetics and evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology) are greatly benefiting the field of evolutionary computation, initiating a promise of renewal in the traditional methodology. While direct encoding has constituted a dominant paradigm, indirect ways to encode the solutions have been reported, yet little attention has been paid to the benefits of the proposed methods to real problems. In this work, we study the biological properties that emerge by means of using indirect encodings in the context of form-finding problems. A novel indirect encoding model for artificial development has been defined and applied to an engineering structural-design problem, specifically to the discovery of tensegrity structures. This model has been compared with a direct encoding scheme. While the direct encoding performs similarly well to the proposed method, indirect-based results typically outperform the direct-based results in aspects not directly linked to the nature of the problem itself, but to the emergence of properties found in biological organisms, like organicity, generalization capacity, or modularity aspects which are highly valuable in engineering.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Lenguajes y Ciencias de la Computación, Universidad de Málaga, Severo Ochoa 4, 29590 Málaga, Spain. dlobo@geb.uma.es
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lobo
authors.forename: Francisco J
authors.initials: FJ
authors.lastname: Vico
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D005075:Biological Evolution; D032701:Biomimetics / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D001703:Biophysics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D015509:Developmental Biology / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D004738:Engineering / Q000379:methods*; D008954:Models, Biological; D009024:Morphogenesis / Q000235:genetics*; D057386:Search Engine / Q000379:methods