Superior Inferior Optimization: A New Metaphor-free Metaheuristic Algorithm and Its Implementation to Solve Standard and Practical Problems

This paper introduces a new metaphor-free metaheuristic algorithm called superior-inferior optimization (SIO). The fundamental concept of SIO comes from exploiting the most and least prominent members within swarm to create the median member. Then, it uses the most prominent and median members as guidance for six possible motions during iteration. SIO effectiveness is measured through experiment that use three cases including a set of 23 functions, two economic load dispatch problems (ELDP), and one balance delivery problem (BDP) which is a derivative of pickup and delivery problem (PDP). In this experiment, five new metaheuristic algorithms are chosen as competitors. The result shows that SIO is competitive in all cases. Besides, the experiment shows that the disparity among algorithms is narrow in both ELDP and BDP where the gap in ELDP is narrower than in BDP. The existence of constraints creates difficulty in creating significant advantage in solving these two practical problems. Source code of SIO can be accessed or available through the following link https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MBNkFWxdjGrYV_QDPcXstjntCIRU2mMN?usp=sharing