Rhizostoma optimization algorithm and its application in different real-world optimization problems

Abstract

In last decade, numerous meta-heuristic algorithms have been proposed for dealing the complexity and difficulty of numerical optimization problems in the real-world which is growing continuously recently, but only a few algorithms have caught researchers' attention. In this study, a new swarm-based meta-heuristic algorithm called Rhizostoma optimization algorithm (ROA) is proposed for solving the optimization problems based on simulating the social movement of Rhizostoma octopus (barrel jellyfish) in the ocean. ROA is intended to mitigate the two optimization problems of trapping in local optima and slow convergence. ROA is proposed with three different movement strategies (simulated annealing (SA), fast simulated annealing (FSA), and Levy walk (LW)) and tested with 23 standard mathematical benchmark functions, two classical engineering problems, and various real-world datasets including three widely used datasets to predict the students' performance. Comparing the ROA algorithm with the latest meta-heuristic optimization algorithms and a recent published research proves that ROA is a very competitive algorithm with a high ability in optimization performance with respect to local optima avoidance, the speed of convergence and the exploration/exploitation balance rate, as it is effectively applicable for performing optimization tasks.