Abstract: According to the characteristics of colony emergence of artificial organizes and the dynamic interaction between them and environment, the food-chain that is also an important and widespread phenomenon in the life system, and the rules of local activities of artificial organizes at different levels are defined to propose an artificial-life based algorithm referred as the food-chain algorithm. It is such a sort of artificial-life algorithms that optimize the computation by imitating the evolution of natural ecosystem and the information processing mechanism of natural organisms. Describes the definition, idea, and flow of the food-chain algorithm, and discusses the relevant rules of metabolic energy and change in neighborhood where the artificial-life individuals do something. Furthermore, the key parameters of the algorithm are systematically analyzed. The test results showed that the food-chain algorithm has such life-like traits as autonomous, evolutionary, and self-adaptive, which are highly fit for the optimization problems of life-like systems, such as the location-allocation problems of distribution network system.