The design of photonic devices in computer simulators is a complex task and, in some cases, there are not analytical solutions to support. An alternative is the application of some optimizations techniques. For this reason, this work presents three different bio-inspired algorithms (GA, ES and AIS) to optimize three different photonic devices. The main objectives are providing a flexible and efficient computational optimization tool to design different photonic devices and benchmarking the efficiency of each one. In addition, the efficiency results compare the optimization convergence and computational efforts necessary for each optimization. ©2009IEEE.