WOASCALF: A new hybrid whale optimization algorithm based on sine cosine algorithm and levy flight to solve global optimization problems

In recent years, researchers have been focused on solving optimization problems in order to determine the global optimum. Increasing the dimension of a problem increases its computational cost and complexity as well. In order to solve these types of problems, metaheuristic algorithms are used. The whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is one of the most well-known algorithms based on whale hunting behavior. In this paper, the WOA algorithm is combined with the Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), which is based on the principle of trigonometric sine-cosine. The WOA algorithm has superior performance in the exploration phase in contrast with the exploitation phase, whereas the SCA algorithm has weaknesses in the exploitation phase. The levy flight dis-tribution has been used in the hybrid WOA and SCA algorithm to improve these deficiencies. This study intro-duced a novel hybrid algorithm named WOASCALF. In this algorithm, the search agents' position updates are based on a hybridization of the WOA, SCA, and levy flight. Each of these metaheuristic algorithms has reasonable performance, however, the Levy distribution caused small and large distance leaps in each phase of the algo-rithm. Thus, it is possible for the appropriate search agent to move in different directions of the search space. The performance of the WOASCALF has been evaluated by the 23 well-known benchmark functions and three real -world engineering problems. The result analysis demonstrates that the exploration ability of WOASCALF has strong superiority over other compared algorithms.