A Critical Review of Major Nature-Inspired Optimization Algorithms

Abstract

Nature-inspired Algorithms are getting more andmore popular in the past few decades owing to their amazing successes insolving a number of real-world optimization problems in different spheres ofhuman endeavour ranging from the financial, medical and industrial toeducational applications etc. Nature-inspired Algorithms (NAs) simulate theharmonious cooperation and competition in nature resulting in amazing solutionsto seemingly impossible human problems. This paper examines ten nature-inspiredtechniques and their applications to different fields of human endeavour andconcludes that the Nature-inspired Algorithms has enormous promise in the questfor greater human development through the harnessing of NAs’ potentials forspeeding-up of industrial processes, minimization of time, financial andcomputer resources required to obtain solutions to complex optimizationproblems etc. However, the study points out certain areas of concern in thedevelopment of the NAs, namely, the apparent lack of clear mathematical cumtheoretical proofs of convergence of these algorithms, manual tuning ofparameters and the recurring issue of experimenting with small-scale problemsvi-a-vis the large and complex real-life problems.