Material Generation Algorithm: A Novel Metaheuristic Algorithm for Optimization of Engineering Problems

A new algorithm, Material Generation Algorithm (MGA), was developed and applied for the optimum design of engineering problems. Some advanced and basic aspects of material chemistry, specifically the configuration of chemical compounds and chemical reactions in producing new materials, are determined as inspirational concepts of the MGA. For numerical investigations purposes, 10 constrained optimization problems in different dimensions of 10, 30, 50, and 100, which have been benchmarked by the Competitions on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), are selected as test examples while 15 of the well-known engineering design problems are also determined to evaluate the overall performance of the proposed method. The best results of different classical and new metaheuristic optimization algorithms in dealing with the selected problems were taken from the recent literature for comparison with MGA. Additionally, the statistical values of the MGA algorithm, consisting of the mean, worst, and standard deviation, were calculated and compared to the results of other metaheuristic algorithms. Overall, this work demonstrates that the proposed MGA is able provide very competitive, and even outstanding, results and mostly outperforms other metaheuristics.