ESSAWOA: Enhanced Whale Optimization Algorithm integrated with Salp Swarm Algorithm for global optimization

In this paper, a novel hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm called ESSAWOA is proposed for solving global optimization problems. The main idea of ESSAWOA is to enhance Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) by combining the mechanism of Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) and Lens Opposition-based Learning strategy (LOBL). The hybridization process includes three parts: First, the leader mechanism with strong exploitation of SSA is applied to update the population position before the basic WOA operation. Second, the nonlinear parameter related to the convergence property in SSA is introduced to the two phases of encircling prey and bubble-net attacking in WOA. Third, LOBL strategy is used to increase the population diversity of the proposed optimizer. The hybrid design is expected to significantly enhance the exploitation and exploration capacity of the proposed algorithm. To investigate the effectiveness of ESSAWOA, twenty-three benchmark functions of different dimensions and three classical engineering design problems are performed. Furthermore, SSA, WOA and seven other well-known meta-heuristic algorithms are employed to compare with the proposed optimizer. Our results reveal that ESSAWOA can effectively and quickly obtain the promising solution of these optimization problems in the search space. The performance of ESSAWOA is significantly superior to the basic WOA, SSA and other meta-heuristic algorithms.