Wingsuit Flying Search Enhanced by Spherical Evolution.

Wingsuit flying search (WFS) is a novel metaheuristic search algorithm that mimics the process of a flier to land on the earth’s surface within their range, i.e., a global minimum of the search space. The main advantage of this algorithm is parameter-free except for the population size and the maximal number of iterations. Spherical evolution (SE) uses a spherical search style which possesses a strong exploring ability especially for multimodal optimization problems. This paper proposes a novel mechanism to incorporate SE into WFS for considerably exploiting the search space while maintaining the strong exploration capability. The resultant hybrid algorithm WFSSE is tested on 30 classical benchmark functions. Experimental results in comparison with other state-of-the art algorithms verify the superior performance of WFSSE in terms of robustness and effectiveness.