Improved imperialist competitive algorithm with mutation operator for continuous optimization problems

Imperialist competitive algorithm is a nascent meta-heuristic algorithm which has good performance. However, it also often suffers premature convergence and falls into local optimal area when employed to solve complex problems. To enhance its performance further, an improved approach which uses mutation operators to change the behavior of the imperialists is proposed in this article. This improved approach is simple in structure and is very easy to be carried out. Three different mutation operators, the Gaussian mutation, the Cauchy mutation and the Lévy mutation, are investigated particularly by experiments. The experimental results suggest that all the three improved algorithms have faster convergence rate, better global search ability and better stability than the original algorithm. Furthermore, the three improved algorithms are also compared with other two excellent algorithms on some benchmark functions and compared with other four existing algorithms on one real-world optimization problem. The comparisons suggest that the proposed algorithms have their own specialties and good applicability. They can obtain better results on some functions than those contrastive approaches.