An improved electromagnetism-like algorithm for numerical optimization

This paper presents a new Electromagnetism-like Mechanism (EM) algorithm with Split, Probe and Compare feature (SPC-EM). The proposed algorithm replaces the local search segment of a standard EM with a new search scheme named Split, Probe, and Compare (SPC). A nonlinear equation is designed to systematically and dynamically adjust the length of the probes based on the outcome of the Compare segment in each iteration. Extensive computational simulations and comparisons on 10 different benchmark problems from the literature were carried out. Results show that the new modified mechanism outperformed all other algorithms involved in the benchmarking. We thus conclude that the proposed SPC-EM works well with the designed probe-length tuning equation in solving numerical optimization problems.