Recent trends indicate rapid growth of nature-inspired optimization in academia and industry

Although researchers often comment on the popularity of nature-inspired meta-heuristics (NIM), there has been very little empirical data to support the claim that NIM are growing in prominence compared to other optimization techniques. This paper presents strong evidence that the use of NIM is not only growing, but indeed appears to have surpassed mathematical optimization techniques and other meta-heuristics in several metrics related to academic research activity (publication frequency) and commercial activity (patenting frequency). Motivated by these findings, this article discusses some of the possible origins of this growing popularity including historical bias, conceptual appeal, simplicity of implementation, and algorithm utility.