An analysis of selection methods in memory consideration for harmony search

This paper presents an analysis of some selection methods used in memory consideration of Harmony search (HS) Algorithm. The selection process in memory consideration entails selecting the value of the decision variable from any solution in the Harmony memory (HM). Quite recently, there has been a tendency to adopt novel selection methods that mimic the natural phenomena of the 'survival of the fittest' to replace the random selection method in memory consideration. Consequently, the value of decision variable selected using memory consideration is chosen from the higher promising solutions in HM. The adopted selection methods include: proportional, tournament, linear rank, and exponential rank. It has been demonstrated that experimenting with any of these methods in memory consideration directly affects the performance of HS. However, the success of these methods is based on choosing the optimal parameter value of each. The wrong parameter settings might affect the balance between exploration and exploitation of the search space. Accordingly, this paper studies the effect of the selection method parameters in order to show their effect on HS behavior. The evaluation is conducted using standard mathematical functions used in the literature for HS adoptions. The results suggest that the optimal setting of the selection method parameters is crucial to improve the HS performance. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.