An Opposition-Based Group Search Optimizer with Diversity Guidance

Group search optimizer (GSO) which is an effective evolutionary algorithm has been successfully applied in many applications. However, the purely stochastic resampling or selection mechanism in GSO leads to long computing time and premature convergence. In this paper, we propose a diversity-guided group search optimizer (DGSO) with opposition-based learning (OBL) to overcome these limitations. Opposition-based learning is utilized to accelerate the convergence rate of GSO, while the diversity guidance (DG) is used to increase the diversity of population. When compared with the standard GSO, a novel operator using OBL and DG is developed for the population initialization as well as the generation jumping. A comprehensive set of 19 complex benchmark functions is used for experiment verification and is compared to the original GSO algorithm. Numerical experiments show that the proposed DGSO leads to better performance in comparison with the standard GSO in the convergence rate and the solution accuracy.