A Modified Harmony Search Algorithm for Optimization Problems

Harmony search (HS) algorithm is a new meta-heuristic optimization algorithm inspired from the music improvisation process. Though the excellent performance makes it wildly used in many areas, it is easy to get trapped in local minima. This paper is to introduce a modified harmony search algorithm to improve the performance of HS algorithm. the method is implemented by adding an "innovative" process on global harmony search algorithm (GHSA), a variant of HS algorithm. This modification would be easy to make a balance of diversification and intensification. the benchmarks are designed to test the performance of the modified HS algorithm and the results show that the innovative HS algorithm has a better performance than the basic HS algorithm and its variants. in addition, to investigate the influence of parameter bw on the algorithm\´s performance, the tests are also conducted under the parameter bw with different types.