Boosted Equilibrium Optimizer Using New Adaptive Search and Update Strategies for Solving Global Optimization Problems

The Equilibrium Optimizer (EO) is an optimization algorithm inspired by a physical law called mass balance, which represents the amount of mass entering, leaving, and being produced in a control volume. Although the EO is a well-accepted and successful algorithm in the literature, it needs improvements in the search, exploration, and exploitation phases. Its main problems include low convergence, getting stuck in local minima, and imbalance between the exploration and exploitation phases. This paper introduces the Boosted Equilibrium Optimizer (BEO) algorithm, where improvements are proposed to solve these problems and improve the performance of the EO algorithm. New methods are proposed for the three important phases of the algorithm: initial population, candidate pool generation, and updating. In the proposed algorithm, the exploration phase is strengthened by using a uniformly distributed random initial population instead of the traditional random initial population and a versatile concentration pool strategy. Furthermore, the balance between the exploration and exploitation phases is improved with two new approaches proposed for the updating phase. These novel methods enhance the algorithm’s performance by more effectively balancing exploration and exploitation. The proposed algorithm is tested using a total of 23 standard test functions, including unimodal, multimodal, and fixed-size multimodal. The results are supported by numerical values and graphs. In addition, the proposed BEO algorithm is applied to solve real-world engineering design problems. The BEO outperforms the original EO algorithm on all problems.