Scouting strategy for biasing fireworks algorithm search to promising directions

We propose a scouting strategy to find better searching directions in fireworks algorithm (FWA) to enhance its exploitation capability. It generates spark individuals from a firework individual one by one by checking if the generated spark climbs up to a better direction, and this process continues until spark individual climbing down is generated, while canonical FWA generates spark individuals around a firework individual at once. We can know potential search directions from the number of consciously climbing up sparks. Besides this strategy, we use a filtering strategy for a random selection of FWA, where worse sparks are eliminated when their fitness is worse than their parents, i.e. fireworks, and become unable to survive in the next generation. We combined these strategies with the enhanced FWA (EFWA) and evaluated using 28 CEC2013 benchmark functions. Experimental results confirm that the proposed strategies are effective and show better performance in terms of convergence speed and accuracy. Finally, we analyze their applicability and provide some open topics.