An Improved Evolutionary Algorithm in Formulating a Diet for Grouper

Abstract

This paper reveals the high demand of fish products in many countries, which subsequently highlighted the high demand of grouper fish species for human consumption. This high demand leads to the insufficient supply of wild ocean grouper fish in the market, thus justifying the need for farmed or cultured grouper fish. Basically, in grouper fish farming, large amounts of trash fish are needed as the feed for grouper fish, which is the carnivorous type of fish. However, since the cost of trash fish is too high, searching for alternative ingredients for the feed through modelling of feed formulation is an option for reducing or minimizing the farming cost. This led to the search for methods in giving the best combination of feedstuff ingredients with appropriate nutrients in formulating the feed. One prospective method is the Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) that has been applied in solving similar problems of diet formulation for several types of animals including livestock, poultry and shrimp. Hence, in this paper, an improved EA method known as the SR-SD-EA is proposed highlighting three important EA operators, which are initialization, selection and mutation. A semi random initialization operator is introduced to filter some important constraints thus increase the chances of obtaining feasible formulations or solutions. Subsequently, the novel selection operator embeds the concept of standard deviation in the SR-SD-EA as part of the function in minimizing the total cost of the formulated grouper fish feed. Eventually, the enhanced boundary-based mutation is also introduced in the algorithm to ensure the crucial constraint of the ingredients’ total weight must be met. The overall structure of the SR-SD-EA is presented as a framework, where the three methodological contributions are embedded. The preliminary findings of SR-SD-EA show that the obtained cost computed based on the Best-So-Far feed formulation as the solution is comparable, while all the crucial constraints are fulfilled.