EXPLICA: An Explorative Imperialist Competitive Algorithm based on the notion of Explorers with an expansive retention policy

Abstract

Meta-heuristic algorithms are of considerable importance in solving optimization problems. This importance is more highlighted when the problems to be optimized are too complicated to achieve a solution using conventional methods or, the traditional methods are somehow not applicable for solving them. Imperial Competitive Algorithm has been proved to be an efficient and effective meta-heuristic optimization algorithm and it has been successfully applied in many scientific and engineering problems. By introducing the concept of explorers and retention policy, the original algorithm is enhanced with a dynamic population mechanism in this paper and hence, the performance of the Imperial Competitive Algorithm is improved. Performance of the proposed modification is tested with experiments of optimizing real-values functions and results are compared with results obtained with the original Imperialistic Competitive Algorithm, Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization and Simulated Annealing. Also, the applicability of the proposed improvement is verified by optimizing a ship propeller design problem.