A novel elitist fruit fly optimization algorithm

Aiming at the poor population diversity and serious imbalance between global exploration and local exploitation in the original fruit fly optimization algorithm (FOA), a novel elitist fruit fly optimization algorithm (EFOA) with elite guidance and population diversity maintenance is proposed. EFOA consists of two search phases: an osphresis search with elite and random individual guiding and a vision search with elite and boundary guiding in an iteration. The former contains two sub-stages: exploration with random individual guiding and exploitation with elite individual guiding. Randomly selected individual and flight control parameter constructed by the Sigmoid-based function are first introduced into the algorithm to improve the exploration. The elite guiding strategy with two position-update approaches is designed to augment the local ability of the proposed algorithm. With these stages, EFOA can search some areas of the problem space as much as possible. Finally, elite and boundary information is introduced into EFOA to enhance population diversity. The proposed EFOA is compared with other algorithms, including the original FOA, three outstanding FOA variants, and five state-of-the-art meta-heuristic algorithms. The validation tests are conducted based on the classical benchmark functions and CEC2017 benchmark functions. The Wilcoxon signed rank test and Friedman test are utilized to verify the significance of the results from the perspective of non-parametric statistics. The results demonstrate that the elite guiding strategy and the alternating execution of the three search stages can effectively balance the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the EFOA and enhance its convergence speed.