HSTLBO: A hybrid algorithm based on Harmony Search and Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization for complex high-dimensional optimization problems

PLoS One. 2017 Apr 12;12(4):e0175114. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0175114. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Harmony Search (HS) and Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization (TLBO) as new swarm intelligent optimization algorithms have received much attention in recent years. Both of them have shown outstanding performance for solving NP-Hard optimization problems. However, they also suffer dramatic performance degradation for some complex high-dimensional optimization problems. Through a lot of experiments, we find that the HS and TLBO have strong complementarity each other. The HS has strong global exploration power but low convergence speed. Reversely, the TLBO has much fast convergence speed but it is easily trapped into local search. In this work, we propose a hybrid search algorithm named HSTLBO that merges the two algorithms together for synergistically solving complex optimization problems using a self-adaptive selection strategy. In the HSTLBO, both HS and TLBO are modified with the aim of balancing the global exploration and exploitation abilities, where the HS aims mainly to explore the unknown regions and the TLBO aims to rapidly exploit high-precision solutions in the known regions. Our experimental results demonstrate better performance and faster speed than five state-of-the-art HS variants and show better exploration power than five good TLBO variants with similar run time, which illustrates that our method is promising in solving complex high-dimensional optimization problems. The experiment on portfolio optimization problems also demonstrate that the HSTLBO is effective in solving complex read-world application.

MeSH terms

  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Computer Simulation
  • Problem Solving

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 11401357, the project of Youth star in Science and technology of Shaanxi Province (2016KJXX-95), and the Scientific Research Program funded by Shaanxi Provincial Education Department (no. 16JK1157) and the Scientific Research Program funded by the Projects Program of Shaanxi University of technology Academician Workstation (No. fckt201509). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.