Orchard Algorithm (OA): A new meta-heuristic algorithm for solving discrete and continuous optimization problems

Population-based approaches have given us new search strategies and ideas in order to solve optimization problems. Usually, these methods are based on the performance carried out by a finite number of agents, which by the interaction between them they evolve and work all over the search space. Also, it is well-known that the correct employment of parameter values in this kind of method can positively impact their performance and behavior. In this context, the present work focuses on the design of a hybrid architecture which smartly balances the population size on run-time. In order to smartly balance and control the population size, a modular approach, named Linear Modular Population Balancer (LMPB), is proposed. The main ideas behind the designed architecture include the solving strategy behind a population-based metaheuristic, the influence of learning components based on multiple statistical modeling methods which transform the dynamic data generated into knowledge, and the possibilities to tackle both discrete and continuous optimization problems. In this regard, three modules are proposed for LMPB, which concern tasks such as the management of the population-based algorithm, parameter setting, probabilities, learning methods, and selection mechanism for the population size to employ. In order to test the viability and effectiveness of our proposed approach, we solve a set of well-known benchmark functions and the multidimensional knapsack problem (MKP). Additionally, we illustrate promising solving results, compare them against state-of-the-art methods which have proved to be good options for solving optimization problems, and give solid arguments for future work in the necessity to keep evolving this type of proposed architecture.

The Sailfish Optimizer: A novel nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm for solving constrained engineering optimization problems

Growth Optimizer: A powerful metaheuristic algorithm for solving continuous and discrete global optimization problems

This paper presents a new bio-inspired metaheuristic algorithm called Red Panda Optimization (RPO) that imitates the natural behaviors of red pandas in nature. The main design idea of RPO is derived from two characteristic natural behaviors of red pandas: (i) foraging strategy, and (ii) climbing trees to rest. The proposed RPO approach is mathematically modeled in two phases of exploration based on the simulation of red pandas’ foraging strategy and exploitation based on the simulation of red pandas’ movement in climbing trees. The main advantage of the proposed approach is that there is no control parameter in its mathematical modeling, and for this reason, it does not need a parameter adjustment process. The performance of RPO is evaluated on fifty-two standard benchmark functions including unimodal, high-dimensional multimodal, and fixed-dimensional multimodal types as well as CEC 2017 test suite. The optimization results obtained by the proposed RPO approach are compared with the performance of twelve well-known metaheuristic algorithms. The simulation results show that RPO, by maintaining the balance between exploration and exploitation, is effective in solving optimization problems and its performance is superior over competitor algorithms. Based on the analysis of the optimization results, RPO has provided more successful performance compared to the competitor algorithms in 100% of unimodal functions, 100% of high-dimensional multimodal functions, 100% of fixed-dimensional multimodal functions, and 86.2% of CEC 2017 test suite benchmark functions. Also, the statistical analysis of the Wilcoxon rank sum test shows that the superiority of RPO in the competition with the compared algorithms is significant from a statistical point of view. In addition, the results of implementing RPO on four engineering design problems confirms the ability of the proposed approach to handle real-world optimization applications.

<p>In last decade, numerous meta-heuristic algorithms have been proposed for dealing the complexity and difficulty of numerical optimization problems in the realworld which is growing continuously recently, but only a few algorithms have caught researchers’ attention. In this study, a new swarm-based meta-heuristic algorithm called Rhizostoma optimization algorithm (ROA) is proposed for solving the optimization problems based on simulating the social movement of Rhizostoma octopus (barrel jellyfish) in the ocean. ROA is intended to mitigate the two optimization problems of trapping in local optima and slow convergence. ROA is proposed with three different movement strategies (simulated annealing (SA), fast simulated annealing (FSA), and Levy walk (LW)) and tested with 23 standard mathematical benchmark functions, two classical engineering problems, and various real-world datasets including three widely used datasets to predict the students’ performance. Comparing the ROA algorithm with the latest meta-heuristic optimization algorithms and a recent published research proves that ROA is a very competitive algorithm with a high ability in optimization performance with respect to local optima avoidance, the speed of convergence and the exploration/exploitation balance rate, as it is effectively applicable for performing optimization tasks.</p>

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to BADS 2011, the third Workshop on Bio-Inspired and Self-* Algorithms for Distributed Systems, co-located with ICAC 2011, the 8th IEEE/ACM International Conferenceon Autonomic Computing, Karlsruhe, Germany, June 14-18, 2011. BADS 2011 aims to provide a forum for exploring bio-inspired and self-* algorithms to build autonomic distributed systems; i.e., self-managing distributed systems that can organize, configure, optimize, scale, protect and/or heal themselves with minimal human intervention. Computing inspired by biology has a long history since 1950s. Its common objectives are to formulate theoretical models that are faithfully designed after biological principles, phenomena and processes and to exploit the models for developing computational tools (e.g., algorithms) and systems. Well-known bio-inspired algorithms include artificial neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, artificial immune systems, reaction-diffusion algorithms, epidemic algorithms, cellular automata algorithms, gene expression/regulatory algorithms and Lindenmayer system. They have been successfully used as alternative and/or superior solutions to the problems that traditional algorithms cannot solve satisfactorily. In recognition of their achievements and potential, bio-inspired algorithms were named one of Scientific American magazine's 10 "World Changing Ideas 2010." The BADS workshop series focuses on distributed computing and examines the opportunities, current state-of-the-art, challenges and future outlook to create autonomic distributed systems with bio-inspired algorithms. We cover a broad range of aspects in distributed computing, including communication protocols, resource clustering, allocation and management, topology management, parallelism and concurrency, overlay construction and maintenance, decentralized information search and delivery, load distribution, synchronization, service selection, composition and deployment, labor division and task allocation, anomaly and misbehavior detection, malware propagation and detection. Following the success of its former editions in 2009 and 2010, BADS 2011 continues to focus on bio-inspired, autonomic distributed systems. In addition, it expands its themes to cover a general class of algorithms that exhibit self-* properties (e.g., self-configuring, self-organizing, self-managing, self-healing, self-scaling and selfadaptive properties) in the context of distributed computing. BADS 2011 has seven research papers selected through a rigorous review process. Each paper was reviewed and judged by at least three PC members on merits including correctness, originality, technical strength, quality of presentation and relevance to the workshop themes. We would like to sincerely thank the Program Committee members who have greatly contributed to the success of BADS 2011. BADS 2011 is organized in two sessions and one keynote presentation. The first session includes papers that present bio-inspired approaches for distributed computing. The second session focuses on solving optimization problems with distributed bio-inspired and self-* algorithms. The keynote presentation, entitled "Methods for Self-organizing Distributed Software", is given by Elisabetta Di Nitto, and focuses on the applications of self-organization in distributed systems. In nature, self-organization occurs such that a global behavior emerges from simple and local decisions made autonomously by each element of the system. This keynote overviews the benefits and challenges to apply the notion of self-organization for the development of distributed systems. It also presents several example applications such as energy efficiency and configuration optimization in cloud computing. The first session, "Bio-inspired Approaches for Distributed Computing", comprises four papers. The first paper, "Memetic Algorithm for Web Service Selection" by Ludwig, studies the service selection process, whose aim is to locate services of interest in service-oriented environments. The author proposes two approaches based on a genetic algorithm and a memetic algorithm to match consumers with services based on Quality of Service attributes. Both approaches are compared with an optimal assignment algorithm, called the Munkres algorithm, as well as with random approaches. The next paper, "OZMOS: Bio-Inspired Load Balancing in a Chord-based P2P Grid" by Brocco, proposes a load balancing mechanism, called Ozmos, that follows the principle of osmosis to relocate tasks between nodes in a P2P-based Grid. Bio-inspired agents are deployed to share information about the status of the Grid as well as to reschedule tasks between nodes. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is illustrated in achieving system-wide load balance in Grids of different scales, with both homogenous and heterogeneous resources. The third paper, "Model-Driven Performance Engineering for Wireless Sensor Networks with Feature Modeling and Event Calculus" by Boonma and Suzuki, proposes an application development framework for wireless sensor networks. The proposed framework allows developers to graphically configure their applications and generate application code. With event calculus, the framework also estimates each application's performance such as per-node power consumption and network lifetime without running it on simulators and real networks. The proposed framework currently targets a shortest-path routing; however, it is a promising next step to estimate the performance of bio-inspired routing protocols such as pheromone-based chemotaxis routing. The last paper of the first session, "Description and Composition of Bio-Inspired Design Patterns: the Gradient Case" by Fernandez-Marquez, Arcos, Di Marzo Serugendo, Viroli and Montagna, investigates a group of bioinspired mechanisms in terms of design patterns. The authors show the relations between the different patterns and identify the boundaries of each mechanism. The mechanisms are organized into different levels. In basic level, Spreading, Aggregation and Evaporation are studied. Gradient is investigated in mid-level, and top-level mechanisms are Chemotaxis, Morphogenesis, and Quorum sensing. The second session, "Solving Optimization Problems with Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms", opens with a paper entitled "Protein Structure Prediction Using Particle Swarm Optimization and a Distributed Parallel Approach" by Kondov and Berlich. It demonstrates the efficiency of the standard Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to find the folded state of two proteins of different sizes starting from completely extended conformations. They illustrate that the predicted structure of the larger protein is in good agreement with the structure from the Protein Data Bank within the experimental resolution. The parallelization of PSO is shown to speed up the simulation linearly with the number of workers and it reduces the prediction time dramatically without loss of accuracy. The next paper, "Discrete Optimization Problem Solving with three Variants of Hybrid Binary Particle Swarm Optimization" by Singh V., Singh D., Tiwari and Shukla, presents three variants of the binary PSO algorithm in order to solve discrete optimization problems. This is achieved by introducing an additional step of crossover that varies in all the three variants. These hybrid algorithms show competitive results compared to other state-of-theart metaheuristics. The third paper, "Self-organized Invasive Parallel Optimization" by Mostaghim, Pfeiffer and Schmeck, proposes a new parallelization framework for optimization algorithms. In this approach, the self-organized resources are represented as a unified resource to the user who only specifies the optimization problem and his/her preferences to the system. The invasive approach starts with one resource and automatically divides the optimization task stepwise into smaller tasks, which are assigned to more resources. The job assignment pattern is decided on demand, i.e., the number of required resources is estimated during the optimization process. The authors examine their generic framework on multi-objective problems.

Discrete tree seed algorithm for urban land readjustment

Adolescent Identity Search Algorithm (AISA): A novel metaheuristic approach for solving optimization problems

Discrete complex-valued code pathfinder algorithm for wind farm layout optimization problem

In many engineering optimization problems, the number of function evaluations is severely limited by the time or cost constraints. These limitations present a significant challenge in the field of global optimization, because existing metaheuristic methods typically require a substantial number of function evaluations to find optimal solutions. This paper presents a new metaheuristic optimization algorithm that considers the information obtained by a radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) in terms of the objective function for guiding the search process. Initially, the algorithm uses the maximum design approach to strategically distribute a set of solutions across the entire search space. It then enters a cycle in which the RBFNN models the objective function values from the current solutions. The algorithm identifies and uses key neurons in the hidden layer that correspond to the highest objective function values to generate new solutions. The centroids and standard deviations of these neurons guide the sampling process, which continues until the desired number of solutions is reached. By focusing on the areas of the search space that yield high objective function values, the algorithm avoids exhaustive solution evaluations and significantly reduces the number of function evaluations. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated through a comparison with popular metaheuristic algorithms across several test functions, where it consistently outperforms existing techniques, delivers higher-quality solutions, and improves convergence rates.

A fuzzy transfer function based on the behavior of meta-heuristic algorithm and its application for high-dimensional feature selection problems

The Social Spider Algorithm (SSA) was introduced based on the information-sharing foraging strategy of spiders to solve the continuous optimization problems. SSA was shown to have better performance than the other state-of-the-art meta-heuristic algorithms in terms of best-achieved fitness values, scalability, reliability, and convergence speed. By preserving all strengths and outstanding performance of SSA, we propose a novel algorithm named Discrete Social Spider Algorithm (DSSA), for solving discrete optimization problems by making some modifications to the calculation of distance function, construction of follow position, the movement method, and the fitness function of the original SSA. DSSA is employed to solve the symmetric and asymmetric traveling salesman problems. To prove the effectiveness of DSSA, TSPLIB benchmarks are used, and the results have been compared to the results obtained by six different optimization methods: discrete bat algorithm (IBA), genetic algorithm (GA), an island-based distributed genetic algorithm (IDGA), evolutionary simulated annealing (ESA), discrete imperialist competitive algorithm (DICA) and a discrete firefly algorithm (DFA). The simulation results demonstrate that DSSA outperforms the other techniques. The experimental results show that our method is better than other evolutionary algorithms for solving the TSP problems. DSSA can also be used for any other discrete optimization problem, such as routing problems.

The cuckoo search (CS) algorithm, which is a new meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, is an efficient approach to solve continuous function optimization problems. Normally, the parameters of the CS are fixed constants. This may result in affecting the algorithm efficiency. To cope with this issue, we properly tune the parameters of the CS and propose an adaptive cuckoo search (ACS) algorithm to enhance the convergence rate and accuracy of the CS. Then, we validate the proposed ACS against test functions and compare its performance with those of particle swarm optimization (PSO), improved cuckoo search algorithm (ICS) and CS by simulation. The simulation results demonstrate that the ACS obtains some solutions better than those obtained by PSO, ICS and CS.

Metaheuristic algorithms are constructed to solve optimization problems, but they cannot solve all the problems with best solutions. This work proposes a novel self-adaptive metaheuristic optimization algorithm, named Optimal Stochastic Process Optimizer (OSPO), which can solve different kinds of optimization problems with promising performance. Specifically, OSPO regards the procedure of optimization as a realization of stochastic process, and with the help of Subjective Probability Distribution Function (SPDF) and Receding Sampling Strategy proposed in this paper, OSPO can control the exploration-exploitation property online by the adaptive modification of the parameters in SPDF. This adaptive exploration-exploitation property of OSPO contributes to dealing with different kinds of problems; thus, it makes OSPO have the potential to solve at least a vast majority of optimization problems. The proposed algorithm is first benchmarked on uni-modal, multi-modal and composite test functions both in low and high dimensions. The results are verified by comparative studies with seven well-performed metaheuristic algorithms. Then, 21 real-world optimization problems are used to further investigate the effectiveness of OSPO. The winners of CEC2020 Competition on Real-World Single Objective Constrained Optimization, SASS algorithm, sCMAgES algorithm, EnMODE algorithm and COLSHADE algorithm are used as four comparative algorithms in real-world optimization problems. The analysis of simulations demonstrates that OSPO is able to provide very competitive performance compared to the comparative meta-heuristics both in benchmark functions and in real-world optimization problems; thus, the potential of OSPO to solve at least a vast majority of optimization problems is verified. A corresponding MATLAB APP demo is available on https://github.com/JiahongXu123/OSPO-algorithm.git.

Black Widow Optimization Algorithm: A novel meta-heuristic approach for solving engineering optimization problems