Chemical Reaction Optimization: a tutorial - (Invited paper)

Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) is a recently establishedmetaheuristics for optimization, inspired by the nature of chemical reactions. A chemical reaction is a natural process of transforming the unstable substances to the stable ones. In microscopic view, a chemical reaction starts with some unstable molecules with excessive energy. Themolecules interact with each other through a sequence of elementary reactions. At the end, they are converted to those with minimum energy to support their existence. This property is embedded in CRO to solve optimization problems. CRO can be applied to tackle problems in both the discrete and continuous domains. We have successfully exploited CRO to solve a broad range of engineering problems, including the quadratic assignment problem, neural network training, multimodal continuous problems, etc. The simulation results demonstrate thatCROhas superior performancewhen compared with other existing optimization algorithms. This tutorial aims to assist the readers in implementing CRO to solve their problems. It also serves as a technical overview of the current development of CRO and provides potential future research directions.