In the recent years, remarkable attention is drawn to Stirling engine due to noticeable advantages, for instance a lot of resources such as biomass, fossil fuels and solar energy can be applied as heat source. Great numbers of studies are conducted on Stirling engines and non-ideal adiabatic method is one of them. In the present study, the efficiency and the power loss due to pressure drop into the heat exchangers are optimized for a Stirling system using non-ideal adiabatic analysis and the second-version Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm. The optimized answers are chosen from the results using three decision-making methods. The applied methods were compared at last and the best results were obtained for the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution decision making method. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.