Mechanical and Civil Engineering Optimization with a Very Simple Hybrid Grey Wolf—JAYA Metaheuristic Optimizer

Metaheuristic algorithms (MAs) now are the standard in engineering optimization. Progress in computing power has favored the development of new MAs and improved versions of existing methods and hybrid MAs. However, most MAs (especially hybrid algorithms) have very complicated formulations. The present study demonstrated that it is possible to build a very simple hybrid metaheuristic algorithm combining basic versions of classical MAs, and including very simple modifications in the optimization formulation to maximize computational efficiency. The very simple hybrid metaheuristic algorithm (SHGWJA) developed here combines two classical optimization methods, namely the grey wolf optimizer (GWO) and JAYA, that are widely used in engineering problems and continue to attract the attention of the scientific community. SHGWJA overcame the limitations of GWO and JAYA in the exploitation phase using simple elitist strategies. The proposed SHGWJA was tested very successfully in seven “real-world” engineering optimization problems taken from various fields, such as civil engineering, aeronautical engineering, mechanical engineering (included in the CEC 2020 test suite on real-world constrained optimization problems) and robotics; these problems include up to 14 optimization variables and 721 nonlinear constraints. Two representative mathematical optimization problems (i.e., Rosenbrock and Rastrigin functions) including up to 1000 variables were also solved. Remarkably, SHGWJA always outperformed or was very competitive with other state-of-the-art MAs, including CEC competition winners and high-performance methods in all test cases. In fact, SHGWJA always found the global optimum or a best cost at most 0.0121% larger than the target optimum. Furthermore, SHGWJA was very robust: (i) in most cases, SHGWJA obtained a 0 or near-0 standard deviation and all optimization runs practically converged to the target optimum solution; (ii) standard deviation on optimized cost was at most 0.0876% of the best design; (iii) the standard deviation on function evaluations was at most 35% of the average computational cost. Last, SHGWJA always ranked 1st or 2nd for average computational speed and its fastest optimization runs outperformed or were highly competitive with their counterpart recorded for the best MAs.