A novel memetic whale optimization algorithm for optimization

Whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is a newly proposed search optimization technique which mimics the encircling prey and bubble-net attacking mechanisms of the whale. It has proven to be very competitive in comparison with other state-of-the-art metaheuristics. Nevertheless, the performance of WOA is limited by its monotonous search dynamics, i.e., only the encircling mechanism drives the search which mainly focus the exploration in the landscape. Thus, WOA lacks of the capacity of jumping out the of local optima. To address this problem, this paper propose a memetic whale optimization algorithm (MWOA) by incorporating a chaotic local search into WOA to enhance its exploitation ability. It is expected that MWOA can well balance the global exploration and local exploitation during the search process, thus achieving a better search performance. Forty eight benchmark functions are used to verify the efficiency of MWOA. Experimental results suggest that MWOA can perform better than its competitors in terms of the convergence speed and the solution accuracy.