Memory based Hybrid Dragonfly Algorithm for numerical optimization problems

•A novel hybrid algorithm (MHDA) based on Dragon Fly and PSO is proposed.•Performance is tested using standard benchmark problems.•Proposed algorithm is compared with well-known optimization algorithms.•Statistical analysis is done using Friedman’s test and Wilcoxon signed ranksum test.•Superiority of MHDA is also proved by applying on engineering design problems. Dragonfly algorithm (DA) is a recently proposed optimization algorithm based on the static and dynamic swarming behaviour of dragonflies. Due to its simplicity and efficiency, DA has received interest of researchers from different fields. However, it lacks internal memory which may lead to its premature convergence to local optima. To overcome this drawback, we propose a novel Memory based Hybrid Dragonfly Algorithm (MHDA) for solving numerical optimization problems. The pbestand gbest concept of Particle Swarm optimization (PSO) is added to conventional DA to guide the search process for potential candidate solutions and PSO is then initialized with pbest of DA to further exploit the search space. The proposed method combines the exploration capability of DA and exploitation capability of PSO to achieve global optimal solutions. The efficiency of the MHDA is validated by testing on basic unconstrained benchmark functions and CEC 2014 test functions. A comparative performance analysis between MHDA and other powerful optimization algorithms have been carried out and significance of the results is proved by statistical methods. The results show that MHDA gives better performance than conventional DA and PSO. Moreover, it gives competitive results in terms of convergence, accuracy and search-ability when compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms. The efficacy of MHDA in solving real world problems is also explained with three engineering design problems.