Crocodile Hunting Strategy (CHS): A comparative study using benchmark functions

The crocodiles have a good strategy for hunting the fishes in nature. These creatures are divided into two groups of chasers and ambushers when hunt-ing. The chasers direct prey toward shallow water with a powerful splash of its tail without catching them, and the ambushers wait in the shallow and try to snatch the fishes. Such behavior inspires the development of a new population-based optimization algorithm called the crocodile hunting strategy (CHS). In order to verify the performance of the CHS, several classical benchmark functions and four constrained engineering design op-timization problems are used. In the classical benchmark function, the comparisons are performed using ant colony optimization, differential evo-lution, genetic algorithm, and particle swarm optimization. Constrained engineering design problems are compared with firefly algorithm, harmony search, shuffled frog-leaping algorithm, and teaching-learning-based opti-mization. The results of the comparison show that different operators de-signed in the CHS algorithm lead to fast algorithm convergence and show better results compared to other algorithms.