A novel meta-heuristic algorithm: dynamic virtual bats algorithm

Nature-inspired algorithms are a very important part of meta-heuristics. A novel nature inspired algorithm called the Dynamic Virtual Bats Algorithm (DVBA) is presented in this paper. DVBA is inspired by a bat’s ability to manipulate frequency and wavelength of the emitted sound waves when hunting. A role based search has been developed to improve the diversification and intensification capability of Bat Algorithm. In the DVBA, there are only two bats: explorer and exploiter bat. While the explorer bat explores the search space, the exploiter bat makes an intensive search of the local with the highest probability of locating the desired target. Depending on their location, bats exchange the roles dynamically.

The performance of the DVBA is extensively evaluated on a suite of 30 bound-constrained optimization problems from CEC 2014 and compared favorably with other well-known meta-heuristics algorithms. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed DVBA outperform, or is comparable to, its competitors in terms of the quality of final solution and its convergence rates.