A New “Doctor and Patient” Optimization Algorithm: An Application to Energy Commitment Problem

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interesting paper and fairly well written. It focuses on solving a complex optimization problem in the energy commitment field using a new optimization method. The manuscript needs some improvement in the following areas.

1. There is A LOT of tabular data. Is there any way to communicate some that data in the form of plots? Does the reader really need to see tables full of data to the third decimal place?
2. These types of optimization methods are new to me (my background is in mathematical gradient-based optimization). The pseudo-code algorithms are somewhat helpful, but how to actually implement these approaches is not at all clear from your descriptions. Perhaps showing more detailed pseudo-code for one of the test objective functions would he helpful (or perhaps point the reader to some github source code).
3. The tabular comparison of means and standard deviations for the test functions could be improved by consistently presenting each row of data in either purely decimal or scientific notation. Currently, you present a mixture that required the reader to do mental conversions to compare the results.
4. The paper ends with a very detailed presentation of optimization results for the energy problem. What is critically missing is: how does the reader know these results are any better or worse that results from another optimization method? A comparison to a few of the other optimization approaches would be helpful, even if only limited final results are presented.

Author Response

A New “Doctor and Patient” Optimization Algorithm: An Application to Energy Commitment Problem

 

 

Ricardo A. Ramirez-Mendoza
Tecnológico de Monterrey, Monterrey NL, 64,489, Mexico

11-Aug-2020

 

 

Applied Sciences Editorial Office

The authors appreciate dear Editor-in-Chief, managing editor, MDPI
Assistant Editor, and the respected reviewers for the carefully consideration and useful comments on the paper. It surely improves the quality of the paper. The paper is revised according to the recommendation and comments given in the decision letter. In the following, the authors' answers and list of changes are presented according to the comments. It must be noted, these modifications are highlighted in the paper.

 

Best regards

 

Ricardo A. Ramirez-Mendoza

Email: ricardo.ramirez@tec.mx

In the attached file, you can find a updated paper version taking into account your valuables comments and suggestions...

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

There are many heuristic optimization methods in the literature. The authors propose a new one, called "Doctor and Patient" Optimization. According to the authors' experiments, it works reasonably well in the scenarios they tried it.

I have the following general comments on the proposed optimization algorithm:

1. The algorithm principle does not seem to be particularly inventive, it is a straightforward model of patient treatment in health care. It does not make it very clear why should we view it as a great new approach.
2. The name Doctor and Patient Optimization, in my view, is not very lucky, because it raises the impression  that it is developed for a special healthcare purpose, rather than as a general purpose optimization method. 
3. It is not really easy to see what are its advantages over the large number of other heuristic optimization methods. 

Nevertheless, it is still useful for the optimization community to become familiar with a new heuristic optimization model, even though there are already so many in the literature. Therefore, I recommend the acceptance of the paper, even though I view it only as average quality.

Author Response

A New “Doctor and Patient” Optimization Algorithm: An Application to Energy Commitment Problem

Ricardo A. Ramirez-Mendoza
Tecnológico de Monterrey, Monterrey NL, 64,489, Mexico

11-Aug-2020

Applied Sciences Editorial Office

The authors appreciate dear Editor-in-Chief, managing editor, MDPI
Assistant Editor, and the respected reviewers for the carefully consideration and useful comments on the paper. It surely improves the quality of the paper. The paper is revised according to the recommendation and comments given in the decision letter. In the following, the authors' answers and list of changes are presented according to the comments. It must be noted, these modifications are highlighted in the paper.

 

Best regards

 

Ricardo A. Ramirez-Mendoza

Email: ricardo.ramirez@tec.mx

 

In the attached file, you can find an updated version of the paper by taking into account your valuables comments and suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf