Evaluation of Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy, Shuffled Complex Evolution and Firefly Algorithms for phase stability, phase equilibrium and chemical equilibrium problems

A Self-Adaptive Step Glowworm Swarm Optimization Approach

When the basic glowworm swarm optimization (GSO) algorithm optimizes the multi-peak function, the solution accuracy is not high, the later convergence is slow. To solve these problems, the fluorescent factor is introduced to adaptively adjust the step length of the firefly, an adaptive step length firefly optimization algorithm is proposed, this algorithm is an improved self-adaptive step glowworm swarm optimization (ASGSO). In this algorithm, the behavior of glowworms are developed, the step size is dynamically adjusted by the fluorescent factor, the algorithm avoids falling into a local optimum and improves the optimization speed and accuracy. The simulation results show that the improved ASGSO can search for global optimization more quickly and precisely.

On the effectiveness of nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms for performing phase equilibrium thermodynamic calculations

The search for reliable and efficient global optimization algorithms for solving phase stability and phase equilibrium problems in applied thermodynamics is an ongoing area of research. In this study, we evaluated and compared the reliability and efficiency of eight selected nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms for solving difficult phase stability and phase equilibrium problems. These algorithms are the cuckoo search (CS), intelligent firefly (IFA), bat (BA), artificial bee colony (ABC), MAKHA, a hybrid between monkey algorithm and krill herd algorithm, covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMAES), magnetic charged system search (MCSS), and bare bones particle swarm optimization (BBPSO). The results clearly showed that CS is the most reliable of all methods as it successfully solved all thermodynamic problems tested in this study. CS proved to be a promising nature-inspired optimization method to perform applied thermodynamic calculations for process design.