Ripple Evolution Optimizer: A Novel Nature-Inspired Metaheuristic

This paper presents a novel Ripple Evolution Optimizer (REO) that incorporates adaptive and diversified movement—a population-based metaheuristic that turns a coastal-dynamics metaphor into principled search operators. REO augments a JADE-style current-to-p-best/1 core with jDE self-adaptation and three complementary motions: (i) a rank-aware that pulls candidates toward the best, (ii) a time-increasing that aligns agents with an elite mean, and (iii) a scale-aware sinusoidal that lead solutions with a decaying envelope; rare Lévy-flight kicks enable long escapes. A reflection/clamp rule preserves step direction while enforcing bound feasibility. On the CEC2022 single-objective suite (12 functions spanning unimodal, rotated multimodal, hybrid, and composition categories), REO attains 10 wins and 2 ties, never ranking below first among 34 state-of-the-art compared optimizers, with rapid early descent and stable late refinement. Population-size studies reveal predictable robustness gains for larger N. On constrained engineering designs, REO achieves outperforming results on Welded Beam, Spring Design, Three-Bar Truss, Cantilever Stepped Beam, and 10-Bar Planar Truss. Altogether, REO couples adaptive guidance with diversified perturbations in a compact, transparent optimizer that is competitive on rugged benchmarks and transfers effectively to real engineering problems.