An efficient equilibrium optimizer with mutation strategy for numerical optimization

To alleviate the shortcomings of the standard Equilibrium Optimizer, a new improved algorithm called Modified Equilibrium Optimizer is proposed in this work. This algorithm utilizes the Gaussian mutation and an additional exploratory search mechanism based on the concept of population division and reconstruction. The population in each iteration of the proposed algorithm is constructed using these mechanisms and standard search procedure of the Equilibrium Optimizer. These strategies attempt to maintain the diversity of solutions during the search, so that the tendency of stagnation towards the sub-optimal solutions can be avoided and the convergence rate can be boosted to obtain more accurate optimal solutions. To validate and analyze the performance of the Modified Equilibrium Optimizer, a collection of 33 benchmark problems and four engineering design problems are adopted. Later, in the paper, the Modified Equilibrium Optimizer has been used to train multilayer perceptrons. The experimental results and comparison based on several metrics such as statistical analysis, scalability test, diversity analysis, performance index analysis and convergence analysis demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can be considered a better metaheuristic optimization approach than other compared algorithms.