Azeotropy in a refrigerant system: a useful scenario to test and compare metaheuristics

The comparison between metaheuristics has been frequently addressed and, in a certain way, there is some controversy regarding the techniques to be employed in such comparison. In a multimodal problem, the capability of the algorithm to identify more than one solution must be considered. Computation time and/or the number of objective-function evaluations are possible metrics to be compared. The robustness and the accuracy of the methodologies are also fundamental quantities. In this work, we present a scenario of comparisons between two metaheuristics – the differential evolution (DE) and the symbiotic organisms search (SOS). This scenario consisted of a problem characterised by a nonlinear algebraic system (converted into an optimisation problem): the double azeotrope in the system ammonia + R-125. The results indicate that DE and SOS exhibit similar performances in the search for the first minimum. Nevertheless, the DE outperformed the SOS with respect to the capability to identify both minima.

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