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Global optimization solves real-world problems numerically or analytically by minimizing their objective functions. Most of the analytical algorithms are greedy and computationally intractable. Metaheuristics are nature-inspired optimization algorithms. They numerically find a near-optimal solution for optimization problems in a reasonable amount of time. We propose a novel metaheuristic algorithm for global optimization. It is based on the shooting and jumping behaviors of the archerfish for hunting aerial insects. We name it the Archerfish Hunting Optimizer (AHO). We Perform two sorts of comparisons to validate the proposed algorithm's performance. First, AHO is compared to the 12 recent metaheuristic algorithms (the accepted algorithms for the 2020's competition on single objective bound-constrained numerical optimization) on ten test functions of the benchmark CEC 2020 for unconstrained optimization. Second, the performance of AHO and 3 recent metaheuristic algorithms, is evaluated using five engineering design problems taken from the benchmark CEC 2020 for non-convex constrained optimization. The experimental results are evaluated using the Wilcoxon signed-rank and the Friedman tests. The statistical indicators illustrate that the Archerfish Hunting Optimizer has an excellent ability to accomplish higher performance in competition with the well-established optimizers., Comment: 41 pages, 14 figures, 41 pages, 132 references, 30 tables

This paper tackles the Multi-Robot Task Allocation problem. It consists of two distinct sets: a set of tasks (requiring resources), and a set of robots (offering resources). Then, the tasks are allocated to robots while optimizing a certain objective function subject to some constraints; e.g., allocating the maximum number of tasks, minimizing the distances traveled by the robots, etc. Previous works mainly optimized the temporal and spatial constraints, but no work focused on energetic constraints. Our main contribution is the introduction of energetic constraints on multi-robot task allocation problems. In addition, we propose an allocation method based on parallel distributed guided genetic algorithms and compare it to two state-of-the-art algorithms. The performed simulations and obtained results show the effectiveness and scalability of our solution, even in the case of a large number of robots and tasks. We believe that our contribution is applicable in many contemporary areas of research such as smart cities and related topics.