A Modified Flower Pollination Algorithm for Global Optimization

Expert and intelligent systems try to simulate intelligent human experts in solving complex real-world problems. The domain of problems varies from engineering and industry to medicine and education. In most situations, the system is required to take decisions based on multiple inputs, but the search space is usually very huge so that it will be very hard to use the traditional algorithms to take a decision; at this point, the metaheuristic algorithms can be used as an alternative tool to find near-optimal solutions. Thus, inventing new metaheuristic techniques and enhancing the current algorithms is necessary. In this paper, we introduced an enhanced variant of the Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA). We hybridized the standard FPA with the Clonal Selection Algorithm (CSA) and tested the new algorithm by applying it to 23 optimization benchmark problems. The proposed algorithm is compared with five famous optimization algorithms, namely, Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithm, Flower Pollination Algorithm, Bat Algorithm, and Firefly Algorithm. The results show that the proposed algorithm is able to find more accurate solutions than the standard FPA and the other four techniques. The superiority of the proposed algorithm nominates it for being a part of intelligent and expert systems. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.