A Modified Group Teaching Optimization Algorithm for Solving Constrained Engineering Optimization Problems

The group teaching optimization algorithm (GTOA) is a meta heuristic optimization algorithm simulating the group teaching mechanism. The inspiration of GTOA comes from the group teaching mechanism. Each student will learn the knowledge obtained in the teacher phase, but each student's autonomy is weak. This paper considers that each student has different learning motivations. Elite students have strong self-learning ability, while ordinary students have general self-learning motivation. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a learning motivation strategy and adds random opposition-based learning and restart strategy to enhance the global performance of the optimization algorithm (MGTOA). In order to verify the optimization effect of MGTOA, 23 standard benchmark functions and 30 test functions of IEEE Evolutionary Computation 2014 (CEC2014) are adopted to verify the performance of the proposed MGTOA. In addition, MGTOA is also applied to six engineering problems for practical testing and achieved good results.