The improvement of glowworm swarm optimization for continuous optimization problems

► The greedy acceptance criterion for the glowworms updating positions is proposed. ► The new formulas for the glowworms movement are proposed. ► Uniform design experiments were investigated the effect of parameters. ► The proposed improvement algorithms were effective than the classical algorithm. Glowworm swarm optimization (GSO) algorithm is the one of the newest nature inspired heuristics for optimization problems. In order to enhances accuracy and convergence rate of the GSO, two strategies about the movement phase of GSO are proposed. One is the greedy acceptance criteria for the glowworms update their position one-dimension by one-dimension. The other is the new movement formulas which are inspired by artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). To compare and analyze the performance of our proposed improvement GSO, a number of experiments are carried out on a set of well-known benchmark global optimization problems. The effects of the parameters about the improvement algorithms are discussed by uniform design experiment. Numerical results reveal that the proposed algorithms can find better solutions when compared to classical GSO and other heuristic algorithms and are powerful search algorithms for various global optimization problems.