Multi-strategy synthetized equilibrium optimizer and application

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2024 Jan 12:10:e1760. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1760. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Background: Improvement on the updating equation of an algorithm is among the most improving techniques. Due to the lack of search ability, high computational complexity and poor operability of equilibrium optimizer (EO) in solving complex optimization problems, an improved EO is proposed in this article, namely the multi-strategy on updating synthetized EO (MS-EO).

Method: Firstly, a simplified updating strategy is adopted in EO to improve operability and reduce computational complexity. Secondly, an information sharing strategy updates the concentrations in the early iterative stage using a dynamic tuning strategy in the simplified EO to form a simplified sharing EO (SS-EO) and enhance the exploration ability. Thirdly, a migration strategy and a golden section strategy are used for a golden particle updating to construct a Golden SS-EO (GS-EO) and improve the search ability. Finally, an elite learning strategy is implemented for the worst particle updating in the late stage to form MS-EO and strengthen the exploitation ability. The strategies are embedded into EO to balance between exploration and exploitation by giving full play to their respective advantages.

Result and finding: Experimental results on the complex functions from CEC2013 and CEC2017 test sets demonstrate that MS-EO outperforms EO and quite a few state-of-the-art algorithms in search ability, running speed and operability. The experimental results of feature selection on several datasets show that MS-EO also provides more advantages.

Keywords: Equilibrium optimizer; Exploitation; Exploration; Feature selection; Meta-heuristic algorithm; Multi-strategy.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Henan Province Soft Science Research Plan Projects (No. 212400410109), the Henan Province Science Foundation for Youths (No. 222300420058), the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (No. 62002103), the Science and Technology Research Project of Henan Provincial Science and Technology Department (No. 232102321064) and the 2021 Henan Province higher Education Teaching Reform research and practice key project (No. 2021SJGLX320). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.