Geometric Selective Harmony Search

This paper presents a new variant of the Harmony Search algorithm, called Geometric Selective Harmony Search. The main differences between the proposed variant and the original formulation of Harmony Search are the integration of a selection procedure in the improvisation phase, a new memory consideration process that makes use of a recombination operator, and the integration of a new mutation operator. We compare Geometric Selective Harmony Search with the original Harmony Search, with another existing variant called Improved Harmony Search, and with two existing selection-based Harmony Search algorithms. The experimental study was conducted on 20 benchmark problems belonging to the CEC 2010 suite, one of the most well-known state-of-the-art benchmark sets. The results show that Geometric Selective Harmony Search outperforms the other studied methods with statistical significance in almost all the considered benchmark problems. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.