A Fault Tolerant Optimization Algorithm based on Evolutionary Computation

In this paper we describe how an evolutionary algorithm is capable of running on a distributed environment with volatile resources. When executing algorithms in a desktop computing or resource harvesting context, resources can be reclaimed by their owners without warning, which may produce data loss and process to fail. The interest of the algorithm presented in the paper is that although it doesn´t keep processes from failing, or data from being lost, it does improve the quality of results because of its design, not employing any special task control, checkpoint/restart or resource redundancies. By means of a series of experiments, we test the performance of the algorithm by studying the number of process failing and the quality of solutions when compared with the classic flavor of the evolutionary algorithm. The new algorithm, which shows its advantages, therefore improve dependability of distributed system