Imperialist Competitive Algorithm with Trading Mechanism for Optimization

International trade is the exchange of capital, goods, and services across different countries. Trading has been explored by economists to be an important mechanism for maintaining development. In an imperialistic country, trading makes imperialists capture resources from colonies, meanwhile providing technologies or cultures for colonies to develop themselves. Inspired by this economic phenomenon, this paper transplants the trading mechanism to imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and proposes an improved ICA with import and export mechanisms (IICA). IICA is designed to alleviate the problem of slow convergence without significantly impairing the parallel competitive feature of ICA. It is characterized by allowing the imperialist to capture useful aspects of colonies to enhance itself, and meanwhile making colonies learn advanced components from their imperialist. In this way, the trading mechanism enables imperialists and colonies to strengthen interactions during them. The performance of IICA is validated on 23 benchmark functions. Its high performance is confirmed by comparing with other ICA variants.