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Structured population in evolutionary algorithms is a vital strategy to control diversity during the search. One of the most popular structured population strategies is the island model in which the population is divided into several sub-populations (islands). The EA normally search for each island independently. After a number of predefined iterations, a migration process is activated to exchange specific migrants between islands. Recently, bat-inspired algorithm has been proposed as a population-based algorithm to mimic the echolocation system involved in micro-bat. The main drawback of bat-inspired algorithm is its inability to preserve the diversity during the search and thus the prematurity can take place. In this paper, the strategy of island model is adapted for bat-inspired algorithm to empower its capability in controlling its diversity concepts. The proposed island bat-inspired algorithm is evaluated using 25 IEEE-CEC2005 benchmark functions with different size and complexity. The sensitivity analysis for the main parameters of island bat-inspired algorithm is well-studied to show their effect on the convergence properties. For comparative evaluation, island bat-inspired algorithm is compared with 17 competitive methods and shows very successful outcomes. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is applied for three real-world cases of economic load dispatch problem where the results obtained prove considerable efficiency in comparison with other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maximum Satisfiability problem is an optimization variant of the Satisfiability problem (SAT) denoted as MAX-SAT. The aim of this problem is to find Boolean variable assignment that maximizes the number of satisfied clauses in the Boolean formula. In case the number of variables per clause is equal or greater than three, then this problem is considered NP-complete. Hence, many researchers have developed techniques to deal with MAX-SAT. In this paper, we investigate the impact of different hybrid versions of binary harmony search (HS) algorithm on solving MAX 3-SAT problem. Therefore, we propose two novel hybrid binary HS algorithms. The first hybridizes Flip heuristic with HS, and the second uses Tabu search combined with Flip heuristic. Furthermore, a distinguished feature of our proposed approaches is using an objective function that is updated dynamically based on the stepwise adaptation of weights (SAW) mechanism to evaluate the MAX-SAT solution using the proposed hybrid versions. The performance of the proposed approaches is evaluated over standard MAX-SAT benchmarks, and the results are compared with six evolutionary algorithms and three stochastic local search algorithms. The obtained results are competitive and show that the proposed novel approaches are effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nurse rostering problem (NRP) is a combinatorial optimization problem tackled by assigning a set of shifts to a set of nurses, each has specific skills and work contract, to a predefined rostering period according to a set constraints. The metaheuristics are the most successful methods for tackling this problem. This paper proposes a metaheuristic technique called a hybrid artificial bee colony (HABC) for NRP. In HABC, the process of the employed bee operator is replaced with the hill climbing optimizer (HCO) to empower its exploitation capability and the usage of HCO is controlled by hill climbing rate ( HCR ) parameter. The performance of the proposed HABC is evaluated using the standard dataset published in the first international nurse rostering competition 2010 (INRC2010). This dataset consists of 69 instances which reflect this problem in many real-world cases that are varied in size and complexity. The experimental results of studying the effect of HCO using different value of HCR show that the HCO has a great impact on the performance of HABC. In addition, a comparative evaluation of HABC is carried out against other eleven methods that worked on INRC2010 dataset. The comparative results show that the proposed algorithm achieved two new best results for two problem instances, 35 best published results out of 69 instances as achieved by other comparative methods, and comparable results in the remaining instances of INRC2010 dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]