A Computational Comparison of Three Nature-Inspired, Population-Based Metaheuristic Algorithms for Modelling-to-Generate Alternatives

In “real life” decision-making situations, inevitably, there are numerous unmodelled components, not incorporated into the underlying mathematical programming models, that hold substantial influence on the overall acceptability of the solutions calculated. Under such circumstances, it is frequently beneficial to produce a set of dissimilar–yet “good”–alternatives that contribute very different perspectives to the original problems. The approach for creating maximally different solutions is known as modelling-to-generate alternatives (MGA). Recently, a data structure that permits MGA using any population-based solution procedure has been formulated that can efficiently construct sets of maximally different solution alternatives. This new approach permits the production of an overall best solution together with n locally optimal, maximally different alternatives in a single computational run. The efficacy of this novel computational approach is tested on four benchmark optimization problems.