An enhanced honey badger algorithm based on Levy flight and refraction opposition-based learning for engineering design problems

Honey badger algorithm (HBA) is a recently developed meta-heuristic algorithm, which mainly simulates the dynamic search behavior of honey badger in wild nature. Similar to other basic algorithms, HBA may suffer from the weakness of poor convergence accuracy, inadequate balance between exploration and exploitation, and ease of getting trapped into the local optima. In order to address these drawbacks, this paper proposes an enhanced honey badger algorithm (EHBA) to improve the search quality of the basic method from three aspects. First, we introduce the highly disruptive polynomial mutation to initialize the population. This is considered from increasing the population diversity. Second, Levy flight is integrated into the position update formula to boost search efficiency and balance exploration and exploitation capabilities of the algorithm. Furthermore, the refraction opposition-based learning is applied to the current global optimum of the swarm to help the population jump out of the local optima. To validate the function optimization performance, the proposed EHBA is comprehensively analyzed on 18 standard benchmark functions and IEEE CEC2017 test suite. Compared with the basic HBA and seven state-of-the-art algorithms, the experimental results demonstrate that EHBA can outperform other competitors on most of the test functions with superior solution accuracy, local optima avoidance, and stability. Additionally, the applicability of the proposed method is further highlighted by solving four engineering design problems. The results indicate that EHBA also has competitive performance and promising prospects for real-world optimization tasks.