Computing Optimal Food Drying Parameters Using the Firefly Algorithm

Abstract

This study uses the Firefly Algorithm (FA) for computing process drying parameters for agricultural produce dehydration. In a case study of mushroom dehydration, the functional form of the dehydration model is approximated using a response surface technique and the resulting optimization model is a non-linear goal programming problem. While various alternate calculational approaches are possible, an FA-driven procedure is implemented for computing the solution. For optimization purposes, it has been demonstrated that the FA is more computationally efficient than other such commonly-used metaheuristics as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, and enhanced particle swarm optimization. Hence, the FA approach is a very computationally efficient procedure. It can be shown that the resulting solution computed for the dehydration process parameters is superior to those from all previous approaches.