  Particle identification is an important feature of the future SPD experiment
at the NICA collider. In particular, identification of particles with momenta
up to a few GeV/c by their time-of-flight will facilitate reconstruction of
events of interest. High time-resolution of modern TOF detectors dictates the
need to obtain the event collision time t0 with comparable accuracy. While
determination of the collision time is feasible through the use of TOF signals
supplemented by track reconstruction, it proves to be computationally
expensive. In this work we have developed a dedicated Genetic Algorithm as a
fast and accurate method to determine the pp-collision time by the measurements
of the TOF detector at the SPD experiment. By using this reliable method for t0
determination we compare different approaches for the particle identification
procedure based on TOF-signals.
