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This paper proposes an improved memetic algorithm relying on ring neighborhood topology for constrained optimization problems based on our previous work in Cai et al. (Soft Comput (in press), ). The main motivation of using ring neighborhood topology is to provide a good balance between effective exploration and efficient exploitation, which is a very important design issue for memetic algorithms. More specifically, a novel variant of invasive weed optimization (IWO) as the local refinement procedure is proposed in this paper. The proposed IWO variant adopts a neighborhood-based dispersal operator to achieve more fine-grained local search through the estimation of neighborhood fitness information relying on the ring neighborhood topology. Furthermore, a modified version of differential evolution (DE), known as 'DE/current-to-best/1', is integrated into the improved memetic algorithm with the aim of providing a more effective exploration. Performance of the improved memetic algorithm has been comprehensively tested on 13 well-known benchmark test functions and four engineering constrained optimization problems. The experimental results show that the improved memetic algorithm obtains greater competitiveness when compared with the original memetic approach Cai et al. in (Soft Comput (in press), ) and other state-of-the-art algorithms. The effectiveness of the modification of each component in the proposed approach is also discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]