A cooperative bat searching algorithm with application to model predictive control

In this paper, a cooperative bat searching algorithm (CBA) is proposed by using a communication topology to share information among all the bats in bat algorithm (BA). Inspired by the cooperation mechanism in the distributed control theory, a cooperative term is added to the original BA to accelerate the searching process. The convergence issue is rigorously studied for CBA by using the Jury’s test. Moreover, numerical evaluation is conducted to compare CBA with other variants of BA by solving fifteen benchmark functions from IEEE congress on evolutionary computation. The results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CBA. As an application, CBA and binary CBA are equipped as the real-time optimizers in a networked model predictive control strategy to solve a balanced coordination problem. The proposed CBA showed competitive performance.