A note on the paper ‘ ‘ A multi - population harmony search algorithm with external archive for dynamic optimization problems

In a very recently presented paper, Turky and Abdullah [5] proposed a novel multi-population harmony search with external archive (MHSA-ExtArchive) for dynamic optimization problems. In the experimental results, the authors claimed that their approach could outperform several state-of-the-art algorithms. They also showed the superiority of their method by means of numerical experiments on Moving Peaks Benchmark (MPB). Despite the interesting idea of applying multi-population scheme on harmony search and using a new type of external archive for dealing with dynamic problems, we believe that there are two very important shortcomings in the result analysis, which we point out in this short note. The main motivation of the present note is to contribute toward preventing the same mistakes from happening by the other researchers. 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. The argument is often made that the ‘‘experimental study’’ is the most important section of a technical or engineering paper where the author(s) describe and justify the outcome(s) of their research. Moreover, in this section the authors compare their proposed method(s) with other state-of-the-art approaches to demonstrate the effectiveness of their methodologies. Also, it is from this section that the readers can distinguish the strength and weakness points of the proposed approach. Therefore, the most critical point in proposing a new algorithm is to make sure that the experimental study section is well-described, easily understandable and on top of those, the simulation results and comparisons are free of any ambiguities and errors. Recently, we have read the paper by Turky and Abdullah entitled ‘‘A multi-population harmony search algorithm with external archive for dynamic optimization problems’’ [5] with the best intentions. The paper is very remarkable since, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that a multi-population harmony search has been applied for solving dynamic optimization problems. Moreover, they have introduced a modified external archive to replace the redundant solutions in the population by good solutions of the archive. In the ‘‘experimental study’’ section, they have evaluated the performance of their algorithm on MPB, which is one of the most widely used synthetic dynamic optimization test suites in the literature.