Population-Based Meta-Heuristic Optimization Algorithm Booster: An Evolutionary and Learning Competition Scheme

In a Population-Based Meta-Heuristic Optimization Algorithm (PMOA), individuals in the population will constantly generate new promising individuals, to form new populations. Although the population continuously changes, the variations in each individual are traceable in most algorithms. An individual in the population comes from the individual in the previous population. The direction of the evolution of populations can be identified on top of this historical inheritance relationship, which improves the efficiency of PMOAs and solves optimization problems more effectively. Since Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are able to capture the temporal dependencies in sequences, we are motivated to propose a novel but simple Evolutionary and Learning Competition Scheme (ELCS), also referred to as the PMOA Booster, in which individuals keep changing for the better fitness based on the heuristic rules of the PMOA while an RNN is used to learn the process that each individual changes in order to guide the generation of promising individuals. The ELCS automatically selects the RNN or PMOA which generates more individuals with the better fitness. We test the proposed scheme using the benchmark of IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2022 competition (CEC 2022). The results show that this scheme is able to boost the performance of both the classical and state-of-the-art PMOAs and outperforms its counterparts. Also, the ELCS produces promising results in two real-world industrial scenarios. We believe that the effectiveness of the proposed ELCS is due to the adaptive competition between the RNN and the PMOA.