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In this paper, in order to prove the effectiveness of the Imperialist Competitive Algorithm — a socio-political inspired algorithm-on finding the optimal solution for different kinds of minimization functions as well as different kinds of landscapes. The reliability and quality of solutions for mathematical minimization functions of the ICA is evaluated by seven distinct benchmark functions where each one displays different behaviors, and then the results of each test is compared with two other optimization techniques, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and the Differential Evolution (DE).

This paper presents a new Cooperative Evolutionary Multi-Swarm Optimization Algorithm (CEMSO-GPU) based on CUDA parallel architecture applied to solve engineering problems. The focus of this approach is: the use of the concept of master/slave swarm with a mechanism of data sharing; and, the parallelism method based on the paradigm of General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) with CUDA architecture, brought by NVIDIA corporation. All these improvements were made aiming to produce better solutions in fewer iterations of the algorithm and to improve the search for best results. The algorithm was tested for some well-known engineering problems (WBD, ATD, MWTCS, SRD-11) and the results compared to other approaches.

Evolutionary Computation (EC) is inspired from by evolution that explores the solution space by gene inheritance, mutation, and selection of the fittest candidate solutions. Since their inception in the 1960s, Evolutionary Computation has been used in various hard and complex optimization problems in search and optimization such as: combinatorial optimization, functions optimization with and without constraints, engineering problems and others (Adeyemo, 2011). This success is in part due to the unbiased nature of their operations, which can still perform well in situations with little or no domain knowledge (Reynolds, 1999). The basic EC framework consists of fairly simple steps like definition of encoding scheme, population generation method, objective function, selection strategy, crossover and mutation (Ahmed & Younas, 2011). In addition, the same procedures utilized by EC can be applied to diverse problems with relatively little reprogramming.

This paper has the purpose to present a new hybrid nature inspired metaheuristic developed based on three fundamentals pillars extremely well known: Genetic Algorithms, Game Theory and Fuzzy Systems. This new approach tries to mimic a little bit more closer how a population of individuals evolves along time, like human social evolution emphasizing the social interaction between individuals and the non-binary behavior of human decision making against the classical cooperate-defect behavior present in the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD), for example. In this way it is presented the Social Interaction Genetic Algorithm (SIGA), to establish the necessary basis for the application of fuzzy concepts to get the F-SIGA Algorithm. Besides that, it is also presented the structure of an individual more complex with a genotype composed of two chromosomes, one for the solution of the problem and the other representing its behavior's strategy, which could be binary or fuzzy. At least the F-SIGA approach is presented in details, including all its steps. And finally some results are presented to an instance of the Traveling Salesman Problem.