A Biologically-Inspired Metaheuristic Approach for the Simultaneous Generation of Alternatives

Decision-making in the “real world” involves complex problems that tend to be riddled with competing performance objectives and possess requirements which are very difficult to incorporate into any underlying decision support models. There are invariably unmodelled elements, not apparent during model construction, which can greatly impact the acceptability of the model's solutions. Consequently, it is preferable to generate numerous dissimilar alternatives that provide disparate perspectives to the problem. These alternatives should possess near-optimal objective measures with respect to all known objectives, but be maximally different from each other in terms of their decision variables. This maximally different solution creation approach is referred to as modelling-to-generate-alternatives (MGA). This article provides an efficient biologically-inspired algorithm that simultaneously generates multiple, maximally different alternatives by employing the Firefly Algorithm metaheuristic. The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated on an engineering optimization benchmark test problem