A parametric testing of the firefly algorithm in the determination of the optimal osmotic drying parameters of mushrooms

The Firefly Algorithm (FA) is employed to determine the optimal parameter settings in a case study of the osmotic dehydration process of mushrooms. In the case, the functional form of the dehydration model is established through a response surface technique and the resulting mathematical programming is formulated as a non-linear goal programming model. For optimization purposes, a computationally efficient, FA-driven method is used and the resulting optimal process parameters are shown to be superior to those from previous approaches. The final section of this study provides a computational experimentation performed on the FA to analyze its relative sensitivity over a range of the two key parameters that most influence its running time.