A modified firefly algorithm based on light intensity difference

Firefly algorithm (FA) is a swarm-intelligence-based, meta-heuristic algorithm and has been widely applied since its establishment in 2009. In this paper, a modified FA based on light intensity difference (LFA) is proposed. The light intensity of a firefly is determined by the landscape of the objective function in FA. The modifications are established in consideration of the variation trend of light intensity differences. As the light intensity differences vary with movements of fireflies, the parameter settings could be adjusted pertinently and self-adaptively at any moment for different problems. The applications to numeric experiments show that, LFA is well adaptive and efficient for different problems, and can make a trade-off between global exploration and local exploitation so as to decrease the risk of premature convergence effectively.