m-MBOA: a novel butterfly optimization algorithm enhanced with mutualism scheme

The simplicity and effectiveness of a recently proposed metaheuristic, butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA) have gained huge popularity among research community and are being used to solve optimization problems in various disciplines. However, the algorithm is suffering from poor exploitation ability and has a tendency to show premature convergence to local optima. On the other hand, the mutualism phase of another popular metaheuristic symbiosis organisms search (SOS) is known for its exploitation capability. In this paper, a novel hybrid algorithm, namely m-MBOA is proposed to enhance the exploitation ability of BOA with the help of mutualism phase of SOS. To evaluate the effectiveness of m-MBOA, thirty-seven (37) classical benchmark functions are considered and the performance of m-MBOA is compared with the performance of ten (10) state-of-the-art algorithms. Statistical tools have been employed to observe the efficiency of the m-MBOA qualitatively, and obtained results confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithm compared to the state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms. Finally, four real-life optimization problem, namely gear train design problem, gas compressor design problem, cantilever beam design problem and three-bar truss design problem are solved with the help of the newly proposed algorithm, and the results are compared with the obtained results of different popular state-of-the-art optimization techniques and found that the proposed algorithm is more efficient than the compared algorithms.