A literature survey of benchmark functions for global optimisation problems

Test functions are important to validate and compare the performance of optimisation algorithms. There have been many test or benchmark functions reported in the literature; however, there is no standard list or set of benchmark functions. Ideally, test functions should have diverse properties to be truly useful to test new algorithms in an unbiased way. For this purpose, we have reviewed and compiled a rich set of 175 benchmark functions for unconstrained optimisation problems with diverse properties in terms of modality, separability, and valley landscape. This is by far the most complete set of functions so far in the literature, and it can be expected that this complete set of functions can be used for validation of new optimisation in the future.

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