Flower pollination algorithm: a comprehensive review

Flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is a computational intelligence metaheuristic that takes its metaphor from flowers proliferation role in plants. This paper provides a comprehensive review of all issues related to FPA: biological inspiration, fundamentals, previous studies and comparisons, implementation, variants, hybrids, and applications. Besides, it makes a comparison between FPA and six different metaheuristics such as genetic algorithm, cuckoo search, grasshopper optimization algorithm, and others on solving a constrained engineering optimization problem. The experimental results are statistically analyzed with non-parametric Friedman test which indicates that FPA is superior more than other competitors in solving the given problem.