Groundwater Flow Algorithm: A Novel Hydro-Geology Based Optimization Algorithm

Abstract

A novel meta-heuristic nature-inspired optimization algorithm known as Groundwater Flow Algorithm (GWFA) is proposed in this paper. GWFA is inspired by the movement of groundwater from recharge areas to discharge areas. It follows a position update procedure guided by Darcy's law which provides a mathematical framework of groundwater flow. The proposed optimization algorithm has been evaluated on 23 benchmark functions. The significance of the results is statistically validated using the Wilcoxon rank-sum, Friedman, and Kruskal-Walis tests. To prove the robustness of the algorithm, it has been further applied on several standard engineering problems. From these exhaustive experiments, it has been observed that the proposed GWFA can outperform many state-of-the-art optimization algorithms. Source code of this work is available at: https://github.com/Ritam-Guha/GWFA.