APPLICATION OF LIFE ALGORITHM TO POWER PLANT OPERATION

摘要

Increasing demand for energy has made power plants bigger and more complex. Thus, their maintenance today needs a very large amount of cost and trouble and once their layouts and operational procedures are fixed, it is very difficult to modify them. To meet the growing demand for energy and to solve such problems, an autonomous system is desired in order to secure more robustness and flexibility. This work is a first step toward establishing such an autonomous System using the concept of Life Algorithm. Life Algorithm (LA) is fundamentally an extension of genetic algorithm. While the conventional GA approach is based on genes and is homogeneous in its essence, LA is something more like a genome and realizes more diversity, and a group of genes each of which has its different evaluation function is considered. Thus, more individuality and more interaction between these groups can be taken into account and more robustness to cope with the widely and quickly changing environment can be realized. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of LA approach to power plant operation by the experiment of a solar cell system.