In Food Industry, the combined treatments based on high-pressure and temperature (HPT) are frequently used to increment the durability of the products without damaging their good properties. However, achieving a reasonable compromise between conservation and quality is usually a challenging task. In a previous work, we proposed a decision tool which solves a multi-objective optimization problem providing a set of good configurations for the HPT equipment in order to adapt the final product to different quality scenarios. The considered optimizer is a population-based evolutionary algorithm that takes the decision maker preferences into account. Nevertheless, when the number of solutions demanded by the decision maker is very large or a high precision is required, the computational time needed by such an algorithm may not be negligible at all. In this work, a parallel version of the optimizer has been designed. This parallel algorithm allows obtaining a greater number of solutions by working with more individuals in the population in reasonable computing times. Additionally, using it, we can consider more iterations in the optimization process that lead us to better distributed and more accurate solutions. A computational experiment shows the good performance of the proposed method.
Citation
Ferrández, M.R., Puertas-Martín, S., Redondo, J.L. et al. J Supercomput (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2351-4