Balancing exploration and exploitation phases in whale optimization algorithm: an insightful and empirical analysis

Agents of any metaheuristic algorithms are moving in two modes, namely exploration and exploitation. Obtaining robust results in any algorithm is strongly dependent on how to balance between these two modes. Whale optimization algorithm as a robust and well recognized metaheuristic algorithm in the literature, has proposed a novel scheme to achieve this balance. It has also shown superior results on a wide range of applications. Moreover, in the previous chapter, an equitable and fair performance evaluation of the algorithm was provided. However, to this point, only comparison of the final results is considered, which does not explain how these results are obtained. Therefore, this chapter attempts to empirically analyze the WOA algorithm in terms of the local and global search capabilities i.e. the ratio of exploration and exploitation phases. To achieve this objective, the dimension-wise diversity measurement is employed, which, at various stages of the optimization process, statistically evaluates the population's convergence and diversity.