VecMetaPy: A vectorized framework for metaheuristic optimization in Python

Abstract

This work aims to accelerate metaheuristic optimization algorithms and their experimental environment using the vectorization feature in the NumPy library in Python. It is built upon EvoloPy, a framework previously introduced by Faris et al. (2016)[41] for metaheuristic optimization in Python. We have vectorized every aspect of this framework including function evaluation, random number sampling, strategy selection, and performing the update equations. We compare the wall-clock time of our vectorized framework for a few algorithms with the original implementation in EvoloPy. The results demonstrate the substantial improvement in the algorithm’s execution time, even to three orders of magnitude in cases like a 180-dimensional search space. The codes can be found at https://github.com/BaratiLab/VecMetaPy.