An efficient and robust grey wolf optimizer algorithm for large-scale numerical optimization

Meta-heuristic algorithms are widely viewed as feasible techniques to solve continuous large-scale numerical optimization problems. Grey wolf optimizer (GWO) is a relatively new stochastic algorithm with only a few parameters to adjust that can be easily used for global optimization. This paper presents an efficient and robust GWO (ERGWO) variant to solve large-scale numerical optimization problems. Inspired by particle swarm optimization, a nonlinearly adjustment strategy for parameter control is designed to balance exploration and exploitation. Additionally, a modified position-updating equation is presented to improve convergence speed. The performance of ERGWO is verified on 18 benchmark large-scale numerical optimization problems with dimensions ranging from 30 to 10,000, 30 benchmarks from CEC 2014, 30 functions in CEC 2017, respectively. Numerical experiments are performed to compare ERGWO to the basic GWO algorithm, other GWO variants, and other well-known meta-heuristic search techniques. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed ERGWO algorithm can find high quality solutions with low computational cost and very fast convergence.