Hybridizing the harmony search algorithm with a spreadsheet ‘Solver’ for solving continuous engineering optimization problems

Abstract

In this article, a hybrid global–local optimization algorithm is proposed to solve continuous engineering optimization problems. In the proposed algorithm, the harmony search (HS) algorithm is used as a global-search method and hybridized with a spreadsheet ‘Solver’ to improve the results of the HS algorithm. With this purpose, the hybrid HS–Solver algorithm has been proposed. In order to test the performance of the proposed hybrid HS–Solver algorithm, several unconstrained, constrained, and structural-engineering optimization problems have been solved and their results are compared with other deterministic and stochastic solution methods. Also, an empirical study has been carried out to test the performance of the proposed hybrid HS–Solver algorithm for different sets of HS solution parameters. Identified results showed that the hybrid HS–Solver algorithm requires fewer iterations and gives more effective results than other deterministic and stochastic solution algorithms.