A Novel Crow Search Algorithm Based on Improved Flower Pollination

Crow search algorithm (CSA) is a new type of swarm intelligence optimization algorithm proposed by simulating the crows’ intelligent behavior of hiding and retrieving food. The algorithm has the characteristics of simple structure, few control parameters, and easy implementation. Like most optimization algorithms, the crow search algorithm also has the disadvantage of slow convergence and easy fall into local optimum. Therefore, a crow search algorithm based on improved flower pollination algorithm (IFCSA) is proposed to solve these problems. First, the search ability of the algorithm is balanced by the reasonable change of awareness probability, and then the convergence speed of the algorithm is improved. Second, when the leader finds himself followed, the cross-pollination strategy with Cauchy mutation is introduced to avoid the blindness of individual location update, thus improving the accuracy of the algorithm. Experiments on twenty benchmark problems and speed reducer design were conducted to compare the performance of IFCSA with that of other algorithms. The results show that IFCSA has better performance in function optimization and speed reducer design problem.