Which method is better for the kinetic modeling: Decimal encoded or Binary Genetic Algorithm?

Kinetic modeling is an important issue, whose objective is the accurate determination of the rates of various reactions taking place in a reacting system. This issue is a pivotal element for the process design and development particularly for novel processes which are based on reactions taking place between various types of species. In this paper, the Genetic Algorithms have been used to develop a systematic computational framework for kinetic modeling of various reacting systems. This framework can be used to find the optimum values of various parameters that exist in the kinetic model of a reacting system. The Fischer-Tropsch (FT) reactions have been used as the kinetic modeling bench mark. General kinetic models for FT, Water-Gas-shift (WGS) and overall rates based on Langmuir-Hinshelwood type have been considered and their optimum parameters have been obtained by Genetic Algorithms. The study shows the obtained model outperforms the other alternative models both in generality and accuracy. Furthermore, the performance of Binary and Decimal Genetic Algorithms have been compared. The obtained results show that despite its ease of implementation, Decimal encoding GA has lower performance comparing to Binary encoding GA. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.