Improved whale optimization algorithm based on random hopping update and random control parameter

Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) is a relatively novel algorithm in the field of meta-heuristic algorithms. WOA can reveal an efficient performance compared with other well-established optimization algorithms, but there is still a problem of premature convergence and easy to fall into local optimal in complex multimodal functions, so this paper presents an improved WOA, and proposes the random hopping update strategy and random control parameter strategy to improve the exploration and exploitation ability of WOA. In this paper, 24 well-known benchmark functions are used to test the algorithm, including 10 unimodal functions and 14 multimodal functions. The experimental results show that the convergence accuracy of the proposed algorithm is better than that of the original algorithm on 21 functions, and better than that of the other 5 algorithms on 23 functions.