An efficient metaheuristic method based on the BitTorrent communication protocol (EM-BT)

In the last few years, considerable attention has been paid to metaheuristic techniques to solve hard optimization problems, as they can produce adequate solutions with less computational complexity. In this paper, an efficient metaheuristic technique based on the BitTorrent communication protocol (EM-BT) is proposed. Our EM-BT algorithm uses the same concept of the BitTorrent communication protocol to ameliorate the communication between the candidate solutions, and manage the way information is exchanged between them in order to provide sufficient exploration and exploitation of the search space. The presented algorithm is evaluated on a group of 23 classical benchmark functions defined in CEC 2005 and 10 functions defined in CEC-C06, 2019. The results show that our algorithm outperforms, in many functions, other metaheuristics such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA), salp swarm algorithm (SSA), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), Jaya algorithm, differential evolution (DE) and genetic algorithm (GA). The difference between the solution obtained with our EM-BT method and the global optimum solution is very small, up to 1 × 10 - 16 , with a low standard deviation, which proves the accuracy, stability and superiority of the proposed method.