Use of Pollination with Wallacei Multi-objective optimization plugin

Grasshopper Plugin
1

HI, I would really appreciate any comments or suggestions regarding the following: I am currently working on a the GH script to undertake a set of multi-objective optimizations as part of an investigation into climate adaptive form generative housing design. I have set up the workflow using Ladybug and Honeybee, it works however it is very slow, taking multiple days to undertake 400 simulations (about 3/5 minutes per simulation). Therfore, I am keen to see if it is possible to use pollination as part of a seamless worklow that would incorporate the plugin Wallacei. I am very keen to reduce my overall simulation time. Many thanks in advance.
Richard

2

Hi @rgarichie, welcome to the :pollination: forum!

I have not used Wallacei but I suspect it is similar to other Grasshopper optimization plugins.

  1. Does Wallacei allow you to feed the results for each generation to the algorithm in one step instead of running one simulation at a time and collecting the results?
  2. Can you run Wallacei outside Grasshopper as a standalone library?

Also, do you really need optimization or can you brute force through the combinations? Can’t you run the full set of simulations and extrapolate the results?

3

Hi Mostapha, Thank you for your response. As far as I am aware here are my answers to your questions. 1. The optimization appears to run when the Wallacei plugin is open, and runs one simulation at a time, collecting each simulation individually. 2. Wallacei runs within Grasshopper, not as a standalone.

Regarding the need to optimize, this is important to me as it is central to my question being investigated. However, I will check out the brute force component as I have not used it before.

Many thanks

4

Hi Richard,

If your assumptions are correct, there is no useful and easy way to integrate the two. The main advantage of using the cloud is to run all those combinations in parallel. Otherwise, you won’t get much benefit from running them one at a time.

I see. In that case, I suggest getting in touch with the Wallacei team and seeing if they have any experience/suggestions for using the plugin with a cloud computing service.

5

I will get in touch with Wallacei. Thank you for taking the time to give your thoughts on this. Much appreciated!

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