A novel bionic algorithm inspired by plant root foraging behaviors

A new bionic algorithm is proposed based on the incentive mechanism of plant root branching, regrowing and tropisms.A new plant root foraging strategy simulates the plant root tropism mechanism and sets up the dynamics mechanism of root growing rapidly towards the global optima.The auxin concentration is set up to determine how to select new growing points and branching number of roots.The mainroot regrowing and the lateral-roots regrowing operators can make appropriate balances between exploration and exploitation. In this contribution, a novel bionic algorithm inspired by plant root foraging behaviors, namely artificial root foraging optimization (ARFO) algorithm, is designed and developed. The incentive mechanism of ARFO is to mimic the adaptation and randomness of plant root foraging behaviors, e.g., branching, regrowing and tropisms. A mathematical architecture is firstly designed to model the plant root foraging pattern. Under this architecture, the effects of the tropism and the self-adaptive growth behaviors are investigated. Afterward, the arithmetic realization of ARFO derived from this framework is presented in detail. In order to demonstrate the optimization performance, the proposed ARFO is benchmarked against several state-of-the-art reference algorithms on a suit of CEC 2013 and CEC 2014 functions. Computational results show a high performance of the proposed ARFO for searching a global optimum on several benchmarks, which indicates that ARFO has potential to deal with complex optimization problems.