A novel population initialization strategy for accelerating Levy flights based multi-verse optimizer.

In this paper, we have designed a new optimization technique, which is named as the Improved Multi-verse Algorithm with Levy Flights (ILFMVO) algorithm. The quality of the population is an important factor that can directly or indirectly affect the strength of an algorithm in searching for the given search space for an optimal solution. Also, having an initialization of the initial population with randomly generated candidate solutions is not an effective idea in every case, especially when the search space is large. Hence, we have updated the Levy flights based Multi-verse Optimizer (LFMVO) by dividing initialization into two parts. To investigate the ability of ILFMVO, we have solved a constrained economic dispatch problem with a non-smooth, non-convex cost functions of three, six, and twenty thermal generator systems and two design engineering problems with nonlinear objectives and complex nonlinear constraints. We have compared our results with other standard algorithms. We have presented the sensitivity analysis to check the robustness and stability of our approach. The outcome demonstrated that ILFMVO has better accuracy, stability, and convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]