A differential-based harmony search algorithm for the optimization of continuous problems

•We introduced a new harmony memory initialization method.•We introduced a new pitch adjustment method based on DE/best/1 mutation strategy.•We comprehensively studied the parameter setting of our algorithm.•We compared our algorithm with the state of the art variants of HS algorithm.•We compared our algorithm with the state of the art variants of DE algorithm.

The performance of the Harmony Search (HS) algorithm is highly dependent on the parameter settings and the initialization of the Harmony Memory (HM). To address these issues, this paper presents a new variant of the HS algorithm, which is called the DH/best algorithm, for the optimization of globally continuous problems. The proposed DH/best algorithm introduces a new improvisation method that differs from the conventional HS in two respects. First, the random initialization of the HM is replaced with a new method that effectively initializes the harmonies and reduces randomness. Second, the conventional pitch adjustment method is replaced by a new pitch adjustment method that is inspired by a Differential Evolution (DE) mutation strategy known as DE/best/1. Two sets of experiments are performed to evaluate the proposed algorithm. In the first experiment, the DH/best algorithm is compared with other variants of HS based on 12 optimization functions. In the second experiment, the complete CEC2014 problem set is used to compare the performance of the DH/best algorithm with six well-known optimization algorithms from different families. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm in convergence, precision, and robustness.