Multi-population differential evolution-assisted Harris hawks optimization: Framework and case studies

The first powerful variant of the Harris hawks optimization (HHO) is proposed in this work. HHO is a recently developed swarm-based stochastic algorithm that has previously shown excellent performance. In fact, the original HHO has features that can still be improved as it may experience convergence problems or may easily become trapped in local optima. To overcome these shortcomings of the original HHO, the first powerful variant of HHO integrates chaos strategy, topological multi-population strategy, and differential evolution (DE) strategy. For this, chaos mechanism is first introduced into the original algorithm to improve the exploitation propensities of HHO. The multi-population strategy with three mechanisms is embedded to augment the global search ability of the method. Finally, the DE mechanism is introduced into the HHO to enhance the quality of the solutions. Based on these well-regarded evolutionary mechanisms, we propose an enhanced DE-driven multi-population HHO (CMDHHO) algorithm. In this work, the proposed CMDHHO is compared with a range of other methods, including four original meta-heuristic algorithms, conventional HHO, twelve advanced algorithms based on IEEE CEC2017 benchmark functions, and IEEE CEC2011 real-world problems. Furthermore, the Friedman test and the non-parametric statistical Wilcoxon sign rank test are used to verify the significance of the results. The results of the experiments show that the three embedded mechanisms can effectively enhance the exploratory and exploitative traits of HHO. The time required for HHO to converge was substantially shortened. We suggest using the proposed CMDHHO as an effective tool to solve complex optimization problems.