An improved clonal selection algorithm using a tournament selection operator and its application to microstrip coupler design

The clonal selection algorithm (CLONALG) is a nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm that has been applied to various complex optimization problems from different fields of study. Tournament selection (TS) is a selection operator that is mainly used in genetic algorithms. In this paper, a novel improved clonal selection algorithm by using the TS operator (ICSAT) is introduced. To observe the improvement, ICSAT was first tested on selected benchmark functions and then to validate its efficiency ICSAT was applied to a microstrip coupler design problem. Although showing some disadvantages that generally exist in all modified algorithms, it is observed that ICSAT has a significant improvement on the performance of CLONALG and can be a good candidate for real case optimization problems.