Adaptive firefly algorithm with chaos for mechanical design optimization problems

•Proposing an extension of firefly algorithm.•Employment of picewise chaos, for an further enhanced diversity.•Making use of a simple but effective constraint handling method.•Making use of an improved local search procedure.

Firefly algorithm (FA) is a newer member of bio-inspired meta-heuristics, which was originally proposed to find solutions to continuous optimization problems. Popularity of FA has increased recently due to its effectiveness in handling various optimization problems. To enhance the performance of the FA even further, an adaptive FA is proposed in this paper to solve mechanical design optimization problems, and the adaptivity is focused on the search mechanism and adaptive parameter settings. Moreover, chaotic maps are also embedded into AFA for performance improvement. It is shown through experimental tests that some of the best known results are improved by the proposed algorithm.

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