Distributed Whale Optimization Algorithm based on MapReduce

Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) is a recent swarm intelligence based meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, which simulates the natural behavior of bubble-net hunting strategy of humpback whales and has been successfully applied to solve complex optimization problems in a wide range of disciplines. However, when applied to large-size problems, its performance degrades due to the need of massive computational work load. Distributed computing is one of the effective ways to improve the scalability of WOA for solving large-scale problems. In this paper, we propose a simple and robust distributed implementation of WOA using Hadoop MapReduce named MR-WOA. MapReduce paradigm is adopted as the distribution model since it is one of the most mature technologies to develop parallel algorithms which automatically handles communication, load balancing, data locality, and fault tolerance. The design of MR-WOA is discussed in details using the MapReduce paradigm. Experiments are conducted for a set of well-known benchmarks for evaluating the quality, speedup, and scalability of MR-WOA. The conducted experiments reveal that our approach achieves a promising speedup. For some benchmarks, speedup scales linearly with increasing the number of computational nodes.