R-GWO: Representative-based grey wolf optimizer for solving engineering problems

Abstract The grey wolf optimizer (GWO) is a well-known nature-inspired algorithm, which shows a sufficient performance for solving various optimization problems. However, it suffers from low exploration and population diversity because its optimization process is only based on the best three wolves greedily, and the information of other wolves does not consider. In this paper, a representative-based grey wolf optimizer (R-GWO) is proposed to tackle with these weaknesses of the GWO. The R-GWO introduces a search strategy named representative-based hunting (RH) a combination of three effective trial vectors inspired by alpha wolves’ behaviors to improve the exploration and diversity of the population. The RH search strategy utilizes a representative archive to reduces the greediness and enhance the diversity of solutions, and it can also strike balance between the exploration and exploitation using a non-linear control parameter. The performance and applicability of the proposed R-GWO were evaluated on CEC 2018 benchmark functions and six engineering design problems. The results were compared by eight state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms: PSO, KH, GWO, WOA, EEGWO, BOA, HHO, and HGSO. Moreover, the results were statistically analyzed by three test Wilcoxon rank-sum, Friedman and mean absolute error (MAE). The performance results show that on all 29 functions with dimensions 30, 50, and 100, the R-GWO is superior to the competitor algorithms except on function 27 on all dimensions and function 22 on dimension 30. The proposed R-GWO is the most effective algorithm compared with competitor algorithms, with an overall effectiveness of 95.4%. The experimental and statistical results show that the R-GWO is competitive and superior to compared algorithms and can solve engineering design problems better than competitor algorithms.