Single search investigation of various searches in recent swarm-based metaheuristics

Swarm intelligence has become a popular framework for developing new metaheuristics or stochastic optimization methods in recent years. Many swarm-based metaheuristics are developed by employing multiple searches whether it is conducted through swarm split, serial searches, stochastic choose. Unfortunately, many existing studies that introduced new metaheuristic focused on assessing the performance of the proposed method as a single package. On the other hand, the contribution of each search constructing the metaheuristic is still unknown as the consequence of the missing of single or individual search assessment. Based on this problem, this work is aimed to investigate the performance of five directed searches that are commonly found in recent swarm-based metaheuristics individually. These five searches include: motion toward the highest quality member, motion relative to a randomly chosen member, motion relative to a random solution along the space, motion toward a randomly chosen higher quality member, and motion toward the middle among higher quality members. In this assessment, these five searches are challenged to find the optimal solution of 23 classic functions. The result shows that the first, fourth, and five searches perform better than the second and third searches.