The palm tree optimization: Algorithm and applications

A novel metaheuristic algorithm has been presented based on the physical significance of palm tree leaves and petioles, which can themselves water and fertilize with their unique architecture. Palm tree leaves collect almost all the raindrops that fall on the tree, which drags the nutrient-rich dropping of crawlers and birds that inhabit it and funnel them back to the palm tree’s roots. The proposed Palm Tree Optimization (PTO) algorithm is based on two main stages of rainwater before it reaches the trunk. Stage one is that the rainwater drops search for petioles in the local search space of a particular leaf, and stage two involves that the rainwater drops after reaching the petioles search for trunk to funnel back to the root along with nutrients. The performance of PTO in searching for global optima is tested on 33 Standard Benchmark Functions (SBF), 29 constrained optimization problems from IEEE-CEC2017 and real-world optimization problems from IEEE-CEC2011 competition especially for testing the evolutionary algorithms. Mathematical benchmark functions are classified into six groups as unimodal, multimodal, plate & valley-shaped, steep ridges, hybrid functions and composition functions which are used to check the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the algorithm. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with better search ability over different classes of benchmark functions and real-world applications.