Co-evolving faults to improve the fault tolerance of sorting networks

Abstract

Fault tolerance is an important objective for circuit design, so it is natural to apply genetic programming techniques that are already being used for circuit design to enhance fault tolerance. We present preliminary evidence that co-evolving faults with circuits enhances the masking of faults in evolved circuits. Our test systems are sorting networks, since these are simple enough to analyze. We show that the overall impact of faults in an evolved sorting network can be reduced proportionally to the strength of co-evolutionary pressure. © Springer-Verlag 2004.