An Evolutionary Firefly Algorithm, Goal Programming Optimization Approach for Setting the Osmotic Dehydration Parameters of Papaya

An evolutionary nature-inspired Firefly Algorithm (FA) is employed to set the optimal osmotic dehydration parameters in a case study of papaya. In the case, the functional form of the dehydration model is established via a response surface technique with the resulting optimization formulation being a non-linear goal programming model. For optimization, a computationally efficient, FA-driven method is employed and the resulting solution is shown to be superior to those from previous approaches for determining the osmotic process parameters. The final component of this study provides a computational experimentation performed on the FA to illustrate the relative sensitivity of this evolutionary metaheuristic approach over a range of the two key parameters that most influence its running time-the number of iterations and the number of fireflies. This sensitivity analysis revealed that for intermediateto-high values of either of these two key parameters, the FA would always determine overall optimal solutions, while lower values of either parameter would generate greater variability in solution quality. Since the running time complexity of the FA is polynomial in the number of fireflies but linear in the number of iterations, this experimentation shows that it is more computationally practical to run the FA using a “reasonably small” number of fireflies together with a relatively larger number of iterations than the converse.