A membrane algorithm with quantum-inspired subalgorithms and its application to image processing

This paper presents a membrane algorithm, called MAQIS, by appropriately combining concepts and principles of membrane computing and quantum-inspired evolutionary approach. MAQIS has four distinct features from the membrane algorithms reported in the literature: initial solutions are only inside the skin membrane; different regions separated by membranes have different components of the algorithm; all the components inside membranes cooperate to produce offspring in a single evolutionary generation; communication rules are performed in a single evolutionary step. Extensive experiments conducted on knapsack problems show that MAQIS outperforms five counterpart approaches and our previous work. The effectiveness of MAQIS is also verified in the application of image processing.