Application of multiobjective optimization to the blending of Traditional Chinese Medicine herbs

A novel multi-objective optimization method to ensuring the inter-batch quality uniformity by blending different batches of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) herbs or natural products is presented. Multiple objectives are often preferred by users; however they cannot be attained in a single objective optimization problem. To conquering this drawback, evaluation function is introduced to incorporate multiples objectives so that a new single objective is only needed to be solved. As a demonstration, 10 batches of Radix isatidis with 5 indicative components are used to set a multiobjective optimization problem achieving the goal of the lowest cost and the best quality simultaneously, and results show that an efficient solution can be obtained.