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Improved imperialist competitive algorithm with mutation operator for continuous optimization problems

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Abstract

Imperialist competitive algorithm is a nascent meta-heuristic algorithm which has good performance. However, it also often suffers premature convergence and falls into local optimal area when employed to solve complex problems. To enhance its performance further, an improved approach which uses mutation operators to change the behavior of the imperialists is proposed in this article. This improved approach is simple in structure and is very easy to be carried out. Three different mutation operators, the Gaussian mutation, the Cauchy mutation and the Lévy mutation, are investigated particularly by experiments. The experimental results suggest that all the three improved algorithms have faster convergence rate, better global search ability and better stability than the original algorithm. Furthermore, the three improved algorithms are also compared with other two excellent algorithms on some benchmark functions and compared with other four existing algorithms on one real-world optimization problem. The comparisons suggest that the proposed algorithms have their own specialties and good applicability. They can obtain better results on some functions than those contrastive approaches.

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Acknowledgments

We sincerely appreciate the supports offered by the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (Grant No. 20110131110042), and the National High Technology Research and Development Program 863 (No. 2008AA04Z130). Meanwhile, we sincerely appreciate editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, 250061, China

    Shuhui Xu, Yong Wang & Peichuan Lu

  2. Key Laboratory of High-efficiency and Clean Mechanical Manufacture (Shandong University), Ministry of Education, Jinan, China

    Shuhui Xu, Yong Wang & Peichuan Lu

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  1. Shuhui Xu
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  2. Yong Wang
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Correspondence to Yong Wang.

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Xu, S., Wang, Y. & Lu, P. Improved imperialist competitive algorithm with mutation operator for continuous optimization problems. Neural Comput & Applic 28, 1667–1682 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-015-2138-y

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