Ecogeography-based optimization: Enhancing biogeography-based optimization with ecogeographic barriers and differentiations

Biogeography-based optimization (BBO) is a bio-inspired metaheuristic based on the mathematics of island biogeography. The paper proposes a new variation of BBO, named ecogeography-based optimization (EBO), which regards the population of islands (solutions) as an ecological system with a local topology. Two novel migration operators are designed to perform effective exploration and exploitation in the solution space, mimicking the species dispersal under ecogeographic barriers and differentiations. Experimental results show that the EBO outperforms the basic BBO and several other popular evolutionary algorithms (EAs) on a set of well-known benchmark problems. We also present a real-world application of the proposed EBO to an emergency airlift problem in the 2013 Ya׳an-Lushan Earthquake, China.