Modified salp swarm algorithm for global optimisation

Salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is a newly swarm-based metaheuristic algorithm that simulate the swimming and foraging behaviour of salps in oceans so to search for global optimum solution. Similarly to other metaheuristic algorithms, SSA suffers from poor convergence rate and stagnation in local optima. In this paper, three different improvements to the original population update process are proposed in order to enhance its exploitation and exploration capabilities. The first modification (MSSA1) introduces the concept of local best information to the followers salps update process allowing a better exploration of local search neighbourhood. The second improvement (MSSA2) provide two followers update process. The first is based on a differential evolution combined with a randomly selected local best position, and the second uses a local search in the global best neighbourhood which is triggered by a non-improvement in the corresponding local best. A third modification to the SSA algorithm (MSSA3) penalises a non-improvement of the local best solution by computing a new corresponding follower’s position based on a local jump in the local best neighbourhood for better exploitation. The performances of the proposed algorithms are tested on 27 CEC’15 test suite, and two real-world optimisation problems. A comparative study using nonparametric statistical tests of the obtained results is conducted against those of eight well-known metaheuristics, including the original SSA. The results indicate an overall distinctive performance of all three modification compared to the remaining algorithms, while MSSA1 scored generally better than MSSA2 and MSSA3.