A bio-inspired evolutionary algorithm: Allostatic optimisation

Over the last decade, several bio-inspired algorithms have emerged for solving complex optimisation problems. Since the performance of these algorithms present a suboptimal behaviour, a tremendous amount of research has been devoted to find new and better optimisation methods. On the other hand, allostasis is a medical term recently coined which explains how the configuration of the internal state (IS) in different organs allows reaching stability when an unbalance condition is presented. In this paper, a novel biologically-inspired algorithm called allostatic optimisation (AO) is proposed for solving optimisation problems. In AO, individuals emulate the IS of different organs. In the approach, each individual is improved by using numerical operators based on the biological principles of the allostasis mechanism. The proposed method has been compared to other well-known optimisation algorithms. The results show good performance of the proposed method when searching for a global optimum of several benchmark functions.