Memetic Harris Hawks Optimization: Developments and Perspectives on Project Scheduling and QoS-aware Web Service Composition

Abstract Harris hawks optimization (HHO) is one of the leading optimization approaches due to its efficacy and multi-choice structure with time-varying components. The HHO has been applied in various areas due to its simplicity and outstanding performance. However,the original HHO can be improved and evolved in terms of convergence trends, and it is prone to local optimization under certain circumstances. Therefore, the performance and robustness of the algorithm need to be further improved. In our research, based on the core principle of evolutionary methods, we first developed an elite evolutionary strategy (EES) and then utilized it to advance HHO’s convergence speed and ability to jump out of the local optimum. We named such an enhanced hybrid algorithm EESHHO in this paper. To verify the effectiveness and robustness of the EESHHO, we tested it on 29 numerical optimization test functions, including 23 classic basic test functions and 6 composite test functions from the IEEE CEC2017 special session. Moreover, we apply the EESHHO on resource-constrained project scheduling and QoS-aware web service composition problems to further validate the effectiveness of EESHHO. The experimental results show that proposed EESHHO has faster convergence speed and better optimization performance by comparing it with other mainstream algorithms. The supplementary info and answers to possible queries will be publicly available at https://aliasgharheidari.com/publications/EESHHO.html . Also, the codes and info of HHO are available at: https://aliasgharheidari.com/HHO.html .