Lifetime Improvement of Digital Microfluidic Biochips based on the Improved Whale Optimization Algorithm for Protein Analysis Instrument System

Digital micro-fluidic biochips (DMFBs) are revolutionizing laboratory procedures for point-of-care clinical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and protein analysis. Those procedures require high precision of the output for every operation so it need to ensure the chip reliability and the chip lifetime. Because the electrodes on the chip may be reused at different experimental stages, a degraded electrode may be reused for many times. So the lifetime of the chips is closely related to the total actuating time of an electrode. Thus, the electrode total actuating time needs to be considered carefully in an efficient DMFBs design process. This paper proposed an improved whale optimization algorithm (IWOA), which can reduce excessive use of an electrode and reuse electrodes in average manner to optimal the longest lifetime of DMFBs during the design process. Firstly, the position mass of individual whales was improved to solve the problem that the data, calculated by the WOA, cannot be directly used to represent the sequence of operations. Secondly, the inertial weight was added to enhance the local search ability of WOA. The simulation experimental results showed that this algorithm was able to solve lifetime optimization problems. The maximum electrode time used was reduced by 10% to 20%. The performance of efficiency and convergence of algorithm were very good.