Hybrid Biogeography Based Optimization for Constrained Numerical and Engineering Optimization

Biogeography based optimization (BBO) is a new competitive population-based algorithm inspired by biogeography. It simulates the migration of species in nature to share information. A new hybrid BBO (HBBO) is presented in the paper for constrained optimization. By combining differential evolution (DE) mutation operator with simulated binary crosser (SBX) of genetic algorithms (GAs) reasonably, a new mutation operator is proposed to generate promising solution instead of the random mutation in basic BBO. In addition, DE mutation is still integrated to update one half of population to further lead the evolution towards the global optimum and the chaotic search is introduced to improve the diversity of population. HBBO is tested on twelve benchmark functions and four engineering optimization problems. Experimental results demonstrate that HBBO is effective and efficient for constrained optimization and in contrast with other state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms (EAs), the performance of HBBO is better, or at least comparable in terms of the quality of the final solutions and computational cost. Furthermore, the influence of the maximum mutation rate is also investigated.