Home → Techniques and Tips → Evolver and RISKOptimizer → Choosing Evolver versus RISKOptimizer
Applies to:
@RISK Industrial Edition 6.x/7.x
Evolver 6.x/7.x
How should I decide whether to optimize with RISKOptimizer or Evolver? Are there any differences between the two?
Optimizer with Evolver when you need to choose the best alternatives, and the effects of your choices are predictable. It's appropriate for models where there is no element of chance. It's also appropriate where chance is involved but doesn't have a major effect on the outcome, so that you just build the likely effects of chance into your model as fixed numbers. The traveling salesman problem is a classic example: you know where all the customers are, and you want to plan a route that minimizes travel time. Evolver tells you the one best route.
RISKOptimizer, part of @RISK Industrial Edition, does optimization with simulation. You use it when your model involves both choices you must make and chance events that you can't control. In the traveling salesman example, RISKOptimizer lets you account for not knowing which customers will actually be getting deliveries on a given day. RISKOptimizer tells you the route that has the best chance of being correct.
If you want to use ten-dollar words, you can say that Evolver does deterministic optimization and RISKOptimizer does stochastic or probabilistic optimization.
See also: Running RISKOptimizer Deterministically
Last edited: 2018-08-10