Disruption: A new operator in gravitational search algorithm

To improve the exploration and exploitation abilities of the standard Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA), a novel operator called Disruption, originating from astrophysics, is proposed. The disruption operator is inspired by nature and, with the least computation, has improved the ability of GSA to further explore and exploit the search space. The proposed improved GSA has been evaluated on 23 nonlinear benchmark functions and compared with standard GSA, the genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization. The obtained results confirm the high performance of the proposed method in solving various nonlinear functions. (C) 2011 Sharif University of Technology. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.