A Migration-Based Cuttlefish Algorithm With Short-Term Memory for Optimization Problems

Cuttlefish algorithm (CFA) is a metaheuristic bio-inspired algorithm that mimics the color-changing behavior by the cuttlefish. It is produced by light reflected from different layers of cells and involves two processes, i.e., reflection and visibility. The reflection process simulates the light reflection mechanism, while the visibility process simulates the visible appearance of the matching pattern used by the cuttlefish. There is no cooperation strategy between the solutions of the CFA's sub-populations. The strategy can improve the capabilities of local exploitation and global exploration in terms of solution diversity and quality during the search process. This paper introduces two schemes to improve the performance of the cuttlefish algorithm in continuous optimization problems. Firstly, a migration strategy is employed between the multi-population cuttlefish to increase solutions diversity during the search process. Secondly, one of the exploitation strategies of the standard cuttlefish is replaced with a new exploitation strategy based on short-term memory. The test demonstrates that the proposed algorithm outperforms the standard cuttlefish algorithm. Besides, the performance of the proposed algorithm was investigated using the CEC2013 benchmarking test functions. Comparisons with several state-of-the-art algorithms were performed, and the outcomes indicated that the proposed method offers a competitive performance advantage over the alternatives.