A structure-protection strategy was proposed to eliminate the deficiency since structures with great evolutionary potentials could be substituted with bad solutions when random walk algorithm with compulsive evolution (RWCE) was applied to heat exchanger network optimization. A new population evolving in parallel with the original population was set to execute structure protection. Individuals in the new population are corresponded with ones in the original population and received their current optimal solutions to form a protective effect. Meanwhile

a novel evolution technique named as “dimensionality-reduction local search” was proposed for the new population. The technique determined the search dimension by controlling the update probability of each dimension

which could tap the evolutionary potentials of the protected solutions fully and thus improving the local search ability. Moreover

major evolution operations of RWCE were adopted by the original population and thus the strong global search ability was maintained. The RWCE with the structure-protection strategy was applied to optimize heat exchanger network with stream splits

some results superior to the reported ones were obtained

demonstrating that the proposed method possessed strong abilities in both the global and local search and improved the search quality.