A comprehensive review on the white shark optimizer, its variants, statistical analysis and performance evaluation

Abstract

The development of novel nature inspired algorithms and their enhancements based on intelligent strategies have seen rapid growth but with similar intrinsic disadvantages. The probable reason being limited investigations were performed on specific algorithms prior to its improvement. To this end, this paper presents a comprehensive review and statistical evaluation of newly developed white shark optimizer (WSO) algorithm to justify the need of fundamental reviewing, performance assessment and statistical analysis before its improvement. The WSO algorithm is one of the recent nature inspired algorithms introduced in 2022, based on exceptional navigation and foraging behaviour of white sharks, and has attracted many researchers in solving complex optimization problems owing to simplistic concept, ease of implementation and optimistic features. The WSO algorithm’s performance was statistically evaluated on twenty unimodal and multimodal benchmark functions, confirming its stability, optimization quality, exploration-exploitation equilibrium and convergence, thus shows its efficiency in solving real-life practical problems with notable usage in solving optimization problems on renewable energy conservation (18 %), image processing (18 %) and engineering (16 %) applications. It was also demonstrated that Springer and Elsevier emerged as the top publisher of WSO-related articles, contributing 28 % and 25 % of the papers, respectively. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the WSO procedure is significantly improved by mostly hybridizing with other metaheuristic algorithms (23 %), incorporating chaotic mapping (10 %), introducing binary versions (6 %) and other refreshing strategies (6 %), respectively. Finally, comparative evaluation of WSO with other metaheuristic algorithms were reported outlining its advantages and disadvantages with probable recommendation for future research directions in improvements of WSO.