Comparison of modern heuristics on solving the phase stability testing problem

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In this paper, we are concerned with the phase stability testing at constant volume, temperature, and moles (<inline-formula><tex-math id="M1">\begin{document}$ VTN $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-specification) of a multicomponent mixture, which is an unconstrained minimization problem. We present and compare the performance of five chosen optimization algorithms: Differential Evolution, Cuckoo Search, Harmony Search, CMA-ES, and Elephant Herding Optimization. For the comparison of the evolution strategies, we use the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. In addition, we compare the evolution strategies with the classical Newton-Raphson method based on the computation times. Moreover, we present the expanded mirroring technique, which mirrors the computed solution into a given simplex.