An Improved Novel Global Harmony Search Algorithm Based on Selective Acceptance

Abstract

The novel global harmony search (NGHS) algorithm is proposed in 2010, and it is an improved harmony search (HS) algorithm which combines the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the genetic algorithm (GA). One of the main differences between the HS and NGHS algorithms is that of using different mechanisms to renew the harmony memory (HM). In the HS algorithm, in each iteration, the new harmony is accepted and replaced the worst harmony in the HM while the fitness of the new harmony is better than the worst harmony in the HM. Conversely, in the NGHS algorithm, the new harmony replaces the worst harmony in the HM without any precondition. However, in addition to these two mechanisms, there is one old mechanism, the selective acceptance mechanism, which is used in the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed the selective acceptance novel global harmony search (SANGHS) algorithm which combines the NGHS algorithm with a selective acceptance mechanism. The advantage of the SANGHS algorithm is that it balances the global exploration and local exploitation ability. Moreover, to verify the search ability of the SANGHS algorithm, we used the SANGHS algorithm in ten well-known benchmark continuous optimization problems and two engineering problems and compared the experimental results with other metaheuristic algorithms. The experimental results show that the SANGHS algorithm has better search ability than the other four harmony search algorithms in ten continuous optimization problems. In addition, in two engineering problems, the SANGHS algorithm also provided a competition solution compared with other state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms.

Keywords

• metaheuristics
• harmony search algorithm
• selective acceptance