Competitive advantages of evolutionary computation for industrial applications

Defining the technical and business competitive advantages of evolutionary computation (EC) is critical for successful marketing of this technology in industry and other research communities. The key competitive advantages of EC, based on industrial applications in the chemical industry are presented in the paper. Gaining competitive advantage by integrating EC with statistical methods, neural networks, and support vector machines is recommended. Several examples of application areas in the chemical industry with demonstrated competitive advantage of EC are given. The most important areas are inferential sensors, empirical emulators of mechanistic models, accelerated new product development, complex process optimization, and effective industrial design of experiments