The Harmony Search in Context with Other Nature Inspired Computational Algorithms

Inspiration drawn from nature and modeling of natural processes are the two common characteristics existing in most NIC algorithms. These methodologies, therefore, share many similarities, e.g., adaptation, learning, and evolution, and have a general flowchart including candidate initialization, operation, and renewal. On the other hand, mimicking various natural phenomena leads to their different generation, evaluation, selection, and update mechanisms, which may result in individual inherent distinctive properties, advantages, as well as drawbacks in the performances of dealing with different optimization problems. For example, the CSA on the basis of modeling the clonal selection principle of the artificial immune system performs well in the local search but suffers from a long convergence time. This chapter compares three typical evolutionary optimization methods, GA, CSA, and HS, with regard to their structures and performances using illustrative examples.