A New Hybrid Firefly - Genetic Algorithm for the Optimal Product Line Design Problem

The optimal product line design is one of the most critical decisions for a firm to stay competitive, since it is related to the sustainability and profitability of a company. It is classified as an NP-hard problem since no algorithm can certify in polynomial time that the optimum it identifies is the overall optimum of the problem. The focus of this research is to propose a new hybrid optimization method (FAGA) combining Firefly algorithm (FA) and Genetic algorithm (GA). The proposed hybrid method is applied to the product line design problem and its performance is compared to those of previous approaches, like genetic algorithm (GA) and simulated annealing (SA), by using both actual and artificial consumer-related data preferences for specific products. The comparison results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid method is superior to both genetic algorithm and simulated annealing in terms of accuracy, efficiency and convergence speed.