Among process synthesis problems, the heat exchanger network (HEN) has been subjected to the most concentrated effort because this kind of problems was well defined for solving it and 20-30% energy savings could be realized in the present chemical processes. In this paper, we use an evolutionary approach for HEN synthesis because this approach can overcome the local optimum and combine some heuristic rules. The basic evolutionary approach is composed of three parts, that is, initialization step, growth step and mutation step, as in the simulated annealing and genetic algorithm. This algorithm uses the ecological rule that a better cell will live and worse cell should decompose after repeated generations. With this basic concept, a new procedure is developed and a more efficient method is proposed to generate initial solutions. Its effectiveness is shown using test examples.