A Multi-strategy Improved Outpost and Differential Evolution Mutation Marine Predators Algorithm for Global Optimization

Marine Predators Algorithm (MPA) is a recent efficient metaheuristic algorithm that is enlightened by the biological behavior of ocean predators and prey. This algorithm simulates the Levy and Brownian movements of prevalent foraging strategy and has been applied to many complex optimization problems. However, the algorithm has defects such as a low diversity of the solutions, ease into the local optimal solutions, and decreasing convergence speed in dealing with complex problems. A modified version of this algorithm called ODMPA is proposed based on the tent map, the outpost mechanism, and the differential evolution mutation with simulated annealing (DE-SA) mechanism. The tent map and DE-SA mechanism are added to enhance the exploration capability of MPA by increasing the diversity of the search agents, and the outpost mechanism is mainly used to improve the convergence speed of MPA. To validate the outstanding performance of the ODMPA, a series of global optimization problems are selected as the test sets, including the standard IEEE CEC2014 benchmark functions, which are the authoritative test set, three well-known engineering problems, and photovoltaic model parameters tasks. Compared with some famous algorithms, the results reveal that ODMPA has achieved better performance than its counterparts in CEC2014 benchmark functions. And in solving real-world optimization problems, ODMPA could get higher accuracy than other metaheuristic algorithms. These practical results demonstrate that the mechanisms introduced positively affect the original MPA, and the proposed ODMPA can be a widely effective tool in tackling many optimization problems.