Harmony Search Algorithm. Theory and Applications

Abstract or Introduction

The aim of this book is to introduce Harmony Search algorithm in the context of solving real life problems. Harmony Search (HS) is a musician’s behavior inspired metaheuristic algorithm developed in 2001, though it is a relatively new meta heuristic algorithm, its effectiveness and advantages have been demonstrated in various applications like traffic routing, multi objective optimization, design of municipal water distribution networks, load dispatch problem in electrical engineering, rostering problems, clustering, structural design, classification and feature selection to name a few.

Optimization is the process of finding the best alternate solution among a given set of solutions under some given constraints. The process of finding the maximum or minimum possible value, which a function can attain in its domain, is known as optimization. One of the most striking trends that emerged in the optimization field is the simulation of natural processes as efficient global search methods.

The natural processes or phenomena are firstly analyzed mathematically and then coded as computer programs for solving complex nonlinear real-world problems. The resulting methods are called Nature Inspired Algorithms that can often outperform classic methods. The advantages of these methods are their ability to solve various standard or application-based problems successfully without any prior knowledge of the problem space. Moreover, these algorithms are more likely to obtain the global optima of a given problem. They do not require any continuity and differentiability of the objective functions.

Also, they work on a randomly generated population of solutions instead of one solution. They are easy to program and can be easily implemented on a computer. Some of the examples of Nature Inspired Optimization Techniques are Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization, Artificial Bee Colony Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization.