Abstract

Metaheuristics have been used to solve combinatorial optimization problems in recent decades. Metaheuristics inspired by various natural phenomena have been proposed due to their optimization characteristics. The Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) is one such metaheuristic inspired by the socio-political process of imperialism. ICA has become popular due to its extensive applications in various engineering domains. Originally, ICA was designed to solve continuous optimization problems. This paper presents a binary version of ICA, dubbed ICA with Binary-encoding (ICAwB), to solve selection problems. ICAwB works with binary encoding and utilizes new socio-politically inspired operators. Additional features are incorporated within ICAwB to develop an improved version dubbed IICAwB. ICAwB and IICAwB with other binary versions of ICA are compared. IICAwB shows much better performance than existing binary ICAs and ICAwB. The proposed IICAwB is quite generic, and its applicability to other combinatorial optimization problems can be attempted with advantage.

Authors

Laxmikant, C. Vasantha Lakshmi, C. Patvardhan
Dayalbagh Educational Institute, India

Keywords

Metaheuristics, Knapsack problem, Discrete optimization, Imperialist Competitive Algorithm, Evolutionary Computation