A Dynamic Quality-Based Harmony Search Algorithm for Solving Constrained Engineering Optimization Problems

Meta-heuristic algorithms overcome the computational drawbacks of the existing numerical methods where they are commonly used to solve constrained engineering problems and find an optimum solution. Solving this kind of problems is considered of high value in many engineering and manufacturing processes. The author have recently published a dynamic and self-adaptive meta-heuristic that is based on the harmony search algorithm. The method has the advantage of dynamically setting optimization parameters based on quality measures that are computed during the optimization process. Testing showed superiority in solving continuous optimization problems with high dimensionality. In this work, the same method is applied with minor modifications to solve constrained engineering problems whereby the feasible search-space is shrunk due to the existing constraints making the problem more difficult. The results obtained are close to those achieved by some other recent meta-heuristic methods. However, there is a room for improvement.