An Ecology-Based Evolutionary Algorithm Applied to the 2D-AB Off-Lattice Protein Structure Prediction Problem

This paper applies an ecology-inspired algorithm (ECO) to solve a complex problem from bioinformatics. The ecological-inspired algorithm represents a new perspective to develop cooperative evolutionary algorithms. Different algorithms are applied to compose the computational ecosystem, both homogeneously and heterogeneously. The aim is to search low energy conformations for the Protein Structure Prediction problem, concerning the 2D-AB off-lattice model. From the results, the heterogeneous configuration obtained the best conformations for almost all cases, possibly due to the use of different intensification and diversification strategies provided by different search algorithms.