A new metaheuristic based on the self-defense techniques of the plants in nature

In this work a new metaheuristic of optimization bio-inspired on the plants self-defense techniques applied to optimization problems is presented. Plants are living beings that are part of a habitat, and in some recent works the authors claim that plants are able to react to different external stimuli. In nature, plants are exposed to a variety of predatory animals such as bacteria, fungi, insect predators in this case (herbivores), and the plants are required to develop different coping techniques to protect themselves from attacks by predators. The development for this approach we consider as a main idea the predator prey model of Lotka and Volterra, where two populations interact with each other and the objective is to maintain the balance between these two. The performance of this algorithm is tested on optimization problems of mathematical functions.