Title: A modified electromagnetism-like mechanism algorithm with pattern search for global optimisation

Authors: Qing Wu; Chunjiang Zhang; Liang Gao

Addresses: College of Engineering, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, Hubei, 430070, China ' The State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, 430074, China ' The State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, 430074, China

Abstract: The solution space of most global optimisation problems is very complex, which puts forward the high requirement for the search performance of algorithms. Electromagnetism-like mechanism (EM) algorithm is a rising global optimisation method. However, the intensification and the diversification of the original EM are not very efficient. This paper proposes a modified EM algorithm. To improve the intensification ability, a more effective variable step size pattern search has been applied to replace the original random line search at the local search stage. Meanwhile, a perturbing point is used to increase the diversity. In addition, the formula of calculating the total force is simplified to accelerate the algorithm's searching process. Numerical experiments are conducted to compare the proposed algorithm with other variants of EM algorithms and different variants of particle swarm optimisation algorithms. The results show that the approach is competitive.

Keywords: electromagnetism-like mechanism algorithm; pattern search; global optimisation; meta-heuristic algorithm; local search.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2018.093778

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2018 Vol.16 No.4, pp.430 - 440

Received: 06 Jan 2016
Accepted: 22 Jul 2016
Published online: 06 Aug 2018 *

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