Slime mould algorithm: A new method for stochastic optimization

Differential Evolution (DE) is arguably one of the most powerful and versatile evolutionary optimizers for the continuous parameter spaces in recent times. Almost 5 years have passed since the first comprehensive survey article was published on DE by Das and Suganthan in 2011. Several developments have been reported on various aspects of the algorithm in these 5 years and the research on and with DE have now reached an impressive state. Considering the huge progress of research with DE and its applications in diverse domains of science and technology, we find that it is a high time to provide a critical review of the latest literatures published and also to point out some important future avenues of research. The purpose of this paper is to summarize and organize the information on these current developments on DE. Beginning with a comprehensive foundation of the basic DE family of algorithms, we proceed through the recent proposals on parameter adaptation of DE, DE-based single-objective global optimizers, DE adopted for various optimization scenarios including constrained, large-scale, multi-objective, multi-modal and dynamic optimization, hybridization of DE with other optimizers, and also the multi-faceted literature on applications of DE. The paper also presents a dozen of interesting open problems and future research issues on DE.

Recent advances in differential evolution – An updated survey

A recent set of overused population-based methods have been published in recent years. Despite their popularity, most of them have uncertain, immature performance, partially done verifications, similar overused metaphors, similar immature exploration and exploitation components and operations, and an insecure tradeoff between exploration and exploitation trends in most of the new real-world cases. Therefore, all users need to extensively modify and adjust their operations based on main evolutionary methods to reach faster convergence, more stable balance, and high-quality results. To move the optimization community one step ahead toward more focus on performance rather than change of metaphor, a general-purpose population-based optimization technique called Hunger Games Search (HGS) is proposed in this research with a simple structure, special stability features and very competitive performance to realize the solutions of both constrained and unconstrained problems more effectively. The proposed HGS is designed according to the hunger-driven activities and behavioural choice of animals. This dynamic, fitness-wise search method follows a simple concept of “Hunger” as the most crucial homeostatic motivation and reason for behaviours, decisions, and actions in the life of all animals to make the process of optimization more understandable and consistent for new users and decision-makers. The Hunger Games Search incorporates the concept of hunger into the feature process; in other words, an adaptive weight based on the concept of hunger is designed and employed to simulate the effect of hunger on each search step. It follows the computationally logical rules (games) utilized by almost all animals and these rival activities and games are often adaptive evolutionary by securing higher chances of survival and food acquisition. This method's main feature is its dynamic nature, simple structure, and high performance in terms of convergence and acceptable quality of solutions, proving to be more efficient than the current optimization methods. The effectiveness of HGS was verified by comparing HGS with a comprehensive set of popular and advanced algorithms on 23 well-known optimization functions and the IEEE CEC 2014 benchmark test suite. Also, the HGS was applied to several engineering problems to demonstrate its applicability. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed optimizer compared to popular essential optimizers, several advanced variants of the existing methods, and several CEC winners and powerful differential evolution (DE)-based methods abbreviated as LSHADE, SPS_L_SHADE_EIG, LSHADE_cnEpSi, SHADE, SADE, MPEDE, and JDE methods in handling many single-objective problems. We designed this open-source population-based method to be a standard tool for optimization in different areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning with several new exploratory and exploitative features, high performance, and high optimization capacity. The method is very flexible and scalable to be extended to fit more form of optimization cases in both structural aspects and application sides. This paper's source codes, supplementary files, Latex and office source files, sources of plots, a brief version and pseudocode, and an open-source software toolkit for solving optimization problems with Hunger Games Search and online web service for any question, feedback, suggestion, and idea on HGS algorithm will be available to the public at https://aliasgharheidari.com/HGS.html .

Hunger games search: Visions, conception, implementation, deep analysis, perspectives, and towards performance shifts

Grey wolf optimizer (GWO) is one of recent metaheuristics swarm intelligence methods. It has been widely tailored for a wide variety of optimization problems due to its impressive characteristics over other swarm intelligence methods: it has very few parameters, and no derivation information is required in the initial search. Also it is simple, easy to use, flexible, scalable, and has a special capability to strike the right balance between the exploration and exploitation during the search which leads to favourable convergence. Therefore, the GWO has recently gained a very big research interest with tremendous audiences from several domains in a very short time. Thus, in this review paper, several research publications using GWO have been overviewed and summarized. Initially, an introductory information about GWO is provided which illustrates the natural foundation context and its related optimization conceptual framework. The main operations of GWO are procedurally discussed, and the theoretical foundation is described. Furthermore, the recent versions of GWO are discussed in detail which are categorized into modified, hybridized and paralleled versions. The main applications of GWO are also thoroughly described. The applications belong to the domains of global optimization, power engineering, bioinformatics, environmental applications, machine learning, networking and image processing, etc. The open source software of GWO is also provided. The review paper is ended by providing a summary conclusion of the main foundation of GWO and suggests several possible future directions that can be further investigated.

Grey wolf optimizer: a review of recent variants and applications

The economic dispatch has the objective of generation allocation to the power generators in such a manner that the total fuel cost is minimized while all operating constraints are satisfied. Conventional optimization methods assume generator cost curves to be continuous and monotonically increasing, but modern generators have a variety of nonlinearities in their cost curves making this assumption inaccurate, and the resulting approximate dispatches cause a lot of revenue loss. Evolutionary methods like particle swarm optimization perform better for such problems as no convexity assumptions are imposed, but these methods converge to sub-optimum solutions prematurely, particularly for multimodal problems. To handle the problem of premature convergence, this paper proposes to apply a novel self-organizing hierarchical particle swarm optimization (SOH_PSO) for the nonconvex economic dispatch (NCED). The performance further improves when time-varying acceleration coefficients are included. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms previous methods for NCED.

Self-Organizing Hierarchical Particle Swarm Optimization for Nonconvex Economic Dispatch

Economic dispatch using hybrid grey wolf optimizer

Economic dispatch using chaotic bat algorithm

Particle swarm optimization for various types of economic dispatch problems

Optimal allocation of distributed generation units is essential to ensure power loss minimization, while meeting the real and reactive power demands in a distribution network. This paper proposes a solution to this non-convex, discrete problem by using the hybrid grey wolf optimizer, a new metaheuristic algorithm. This algorithm is applied to IEEE 33-, IEEE 69-, and Indian 85-bus radial distribution systems to minimize the power loss. The results show that there is a considerable reduction in the power loss and an enhancement of the voltage profile of the buses across the network. Comparisons show that the proposed method outperforms all other metaheuristic methods, and matches the best results by other methods, including exhaustive search, suggesting that the solution obtained is a global optimum. Furthermore, unlike for most other metaheuristic methods, this is achieved with no tuning of the algorithm on the part of the user, except for the specification of the population size.

T. Raghunathan

Papers

Economic dispatch using hybrid grey wolf optimizer

Economic dispatch using chaotic bat algorithm

Particle swarm optimization for various types of economic dispatch problems

Optimal Allocation of Distributed Generation Using Hybrid Grey Wolf Optimizer

Evolutionary programming techniques for different kinds of economic dispatch problems