Social group optimization (SGO): a new population evolutionary optimization technique

Social group optimization (SGO), a population-based optimization technique is proposed in this paper. It is inspired from the concept of social behavior of human toward solving a complex problem. The concept and the mathematical formulation of SGO algorithm is explained in this paper with a flowchart. To judge the effectiveness of SGO, extensive experiments have been conducted on number of different unconstrained benchmark functions as well as standard numerical benchmark functions taken from the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2005 competition. Performance comparisons are made between state-of-the-art optimization techniques, like GA, PSO, DE, ABC and its variants, and the recently developed TLBO. The investigational outcomes show that the proposed social group optimization outperforms all the investigated optimization techniques in computational costs and also provides optimal solutions for most of the functions considered in our work. The proposed technique is found to be very simple and straightforward to implement as well. It is believed that SGO will supplement the group of effective and efficient optimization techniques in the population-based category and give researchers wide scope to choose this in their respective applications.