Biogeography-based Optimization Algorithm

Biogeography-based optimization (BBO) is a new population-based evolutionary algorithm and is based on an old theory of island biogeography that explains the geographical distribution of biological organisms. BBO was introduced in 2008 and then a lot of modifications and hybridizations were employed to enhance its performance. The researchers found that the original version of BBO has some weakness on its exploration. This paper tries to solve the root problems itself instead of solving its effect by using different techniques. It proposes two modifications; firstly, modifying the probabilistic selection process of the migration and mutation stages to give a fairly randomized selection for all the features of the islands. Secondly, the clear duplication process, which is located after the mutation stage, is sized to avoid any corruption on the suitability index variables of the non-mutated islands. The proposed modifications are extensively tested on 120 test functions with different dimensions and complexities. The results proved that the BBO performance can be enhanced effectively without embedding any additional sub-algorithm, and without using any complicated form of the immigration and emigration rates. In addition, the new BBO algorithm requires less CPU time and becomes even faster than the original simplified partial migration-based BBO. These essential modifications have to be considered as an initial step for any other modifications.