Most real-world optimization problems often come with multiple global optima or local optima. Therefore, increasing niching metaheuristic algorithms, which devote to finding multiple optima in a single run, are developed to solve these multimodal optimization problems. However, there are two difficulties urgently to be solved for most existing niching metaheuristic algorithms: how to set the niching parameter values for different optimization problems and how to jump out of the local optima efficiently. These two difficulties limit their practicality largely. Based on Whale Swarm Algorithm (WSA) we proposed previously, this paper presents a new multimodal optimizer named WSA with Iterative Counter (WSA-IC) to address these two difficulties. On the one hand, WSA-IC improves the iteration rule of the original WSA for multimodal optimization, which removes the need of specifying different values of attenuation coefficient for different problems to form multiple subpopulations, without introducing any niching parameter. On the other hand, WSA-IC enables the identification of extreme points during the iterations relying on two new parameters (i.e., stability threshold (T_ s ) and fitness threshold (T_ f )), to jump out of the located extreme points. Moreover, the convergence of WSA-IC is proved. Finally, the proposed WSA-IC is compared with several niching metaheuristic algorithms on CEC2015 niching benchmark test functions and on five additional high-dimensional multimodal functions. The experimental results demonstrate that WSA-IC statistically outperforms other niching metaheuristic algorithms on most test functions.
Evolutionary algorithms integrating various niching techniques have been widely used to find multiple optima of an optimization problem. In recent years, an increasing amount of research has been focused on the design and application of speciation-based niching techniques. These techniques rely on speciation to partition a population into subpopulations (species) such that each occupies a different region of attraction (niche) on the fitness landscape. Existing speciation methods are either distance-based or topology-based. Topology-based methods are more flexible and have fewer assumptions than distance-based methods. However, existing topology-based methods all require sampling and evaluating new individuals in order to capture the landscape topography. This incurs additional fitness evaluations (FEs), which is a drawback, especially when the FE budget is limited. In this paper, a new topology-based speciation method named history-based topological speciation (HTS) is proposed. It relies exclusively on search history to capture the landscape topography and, therefore, does not require any additional FEs to be performed. To the best of our knowledge, HTS is the only parameter-free speciation method at the moment. Both theoretical and empirical analyses have been conducted. Theoretical analysis shows that HTS incurs acceptable computational overhead. In the experimental study, HTS outperformed existing topology-based methods on benchmark functions in up to 32-D space and with as many as 50 optima, and the time overhead was practically negligible if a single FE took seconds.