A parametric testing of the Firefly algorithm in the determination of the optimal osmotic drying parameters for papaya

This study employs the Firefly Algorithm (FA) to determine optimal parameter settings for the osmotic dehydration process of papaya. The functional formulation of the osmotic dehydration model is established using a response surface technique with the format of the resulting optimization model being a non-linear goal programming problem. For optimization purposes, a computationally efficient, FA-driven method is employed and the resulting solution for the osmotic process parameters is superior to those from previous approaches. The final component of this study provides a computational experimentation performed on the FA to illustrate the relative sensitivity of this nature-inspired metaheuristic approach over the range of two key parameters.