Benchmarking analysis for biological-based metaheuristics

Abstract

This article reviews the metaheuristics published in the literature, emphasizing their usefulness in solving complex optimization problems. The review highlights inspiration's relevance in the metaheuristics design, being the main classification in multiple taxonomies existing in the literature.
After reviewing the state of the art, six of the most relevant metaheuristics used to solve problems of various types (engineering, logistics, economics, data science, ...) were selected. This selection of metaheuristics will be subjected to an analysis of their performance using a set of problems selected from different authors. The problems selected for this analysis include problems with a single minimum or multiple minima, different sizes in terms of dimensions, and different types of mathematical functions such as polynomial, trigonometric, or exponential. The analysis offers a discussion of which scenarios are the best for each metaheuristic, analyzing aspects such as the ability of metaheuristics to explore and escape local minima. The article concludes by summarizing which metaheuristic is best for each type of problem.