A binary variant of lightning search algorithm: BLSA

Lightning search algorithm (LSA) is a novel nature-inspired optimization algorithm based on the phenomenon of lighting. This optimization algorithm is generalized from the mechanism of step leader propagation. In this study, a variant of LSA for solving binary optimization problems called as binary LSA (BLSA) is presented. It is done by introducing some modification and introducing tangent hyperbolic sigmoid activation function in updating process of the original version of LSA. To evaluate the quality, convergence rate and robustness of the algorithm, the BLSA is tested with a set of well-utilized 24 benchmark functions. Furthermore, a comparative study with other four well-known binary optimization methods is given for validation of the BLSA performance. The results affirm that the proposed BLSA outperforms the other binary optimization algorithms in multidimensional search space in terms of search accuracy and convergence.