A hybrid algorithm based on particle swarm and chemical reaction optimization for multi-object problems

•A new hybrid method is proposed for multi-object optimization.•The modified chemical reaction optimization (CRO) operators are proposed for multi-object optimization.•A new parameter is proposed to balance between CRO operators and particle swarm optimization operator.•Based on crowding distance mechanism, a new method is proposed to increase the diversity of archiving solutions.

Over the past decade, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been an effective algorithm for solving single and multi-object optimization problems. Recently, the chemical reaction optimization (CRO) algorithm is emerging as a new algorithm used to efficiently solve single-object optimization.In this paper, we present HP-CRO (hybrid of PSO and CRO) a new hybrid algorithm for multi-object optimization. This algorithm has features of CRO and PSO, HP-CRO creates new molecules (particles) not only used by CRO operations as found in CRO algorithm but also by mechanisms of PSO. The balancing of CRO and PSO operators shows that the method can be used to avoid premature convergence and explore more in the search space.This paper proposes a model with modified CRO operators and also adding new saving molecules into the external population to increase the diversity. The experimental results of the HP-CRO algorithm compared to some meta-heuristics algorithms such as FMOPSO, MOPSO, NSGAII and SPEA2 show that there is improved efficiency of the HP-CRO algorithm for solving multi-object optimization problems.

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