An efficient modified harmony search algorithm with intersect mutation operator and cellular local search for continuous function optimization problems

This paper proposes a modified harmony search (MHS) algorithm with an intersect mutation operator and cellular local search for continuous function optimization problems. Instead of focusing on the intelligent tuning of the parameters during the searching process, the MHS algorithm divides all harmonies in harmony memory into a better part and a worse part according to their fitness. The novel intersect mutation operation has been developed to generate new -harmony vectors. Furthermore, a cellular local search also has been developed in MHS, that helps to improve the optimization performance by exploring a huge search space in the early run phase to avoid premature, and exploiting a small region in the later run phase to refine the final solutions. To obtain better parameter settings for the proposed MHS algorithm, the impacts of the parameters are analyzed by an orthogonal test and a range analysis method. Finally, two sets of famous benchmark functions have been used to test and evaluate the performance of the proposed MHS algorithm. Functions in these benchmark sets have different characteristics so they can give a comprehensive evaluation on the performance of MHS. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm not only performs better than those state-of-the-art HS variants but is also competitive with other famous meta-heuristic algorithms in terms of the solution accuracy and efficiency.