An Improved Lion Swarm Optimization Algorithm With Chaotic Mutation Strategy and Boundary Mutation Strategy for Global Optimization

Lion swarm optimization (LSO) inspired by the natural division of labor among lion king, lionesses and lion cubs in a lion group, i.e., lion king guarding, lionesses hunting and lion cubs following, is a relatively novel swarm intelligent optimization technique. Due to its remarkable performance, the canonical LSO has been extensively researched. However, how to balance contradictions between the exploration and the exploitation and alleviate the premature convergence are two critical concerns that need to be dealt with in the LSO study. To address these two drawbacks, enhance the optimization performance, and broaden its application domain, an improved lion swarm optimization algorithm with chaotic mutation strategy and a boundary mutation strategy (CBLSO) is proposed in this paper. In the proposed algorithm, a chaotic mutation strategy based on chaotic cubic mapping is designed to enhance the exploration ability of the algorithm, while the boundary mutation strategy based on the concept of multilevel parallel is adopted to manage boundary constraint violations, which is beneficial for improving the exploitation ability of the algorithm. The proposed CBLSO is evaluated on 56 classic test functions and 30 CEC2014 benchmark functions, and is compared with quite a few state-of-the-art algorithms regarding often-used performance metrics. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the embedded strategies on balancing the exploration and the exploitation. Furthermore, the proposed CBLSO is applied to the optimal dispatch problem of cascade hydropower stations based on a novel constraints handling method designed in this paper to validate its good practicability and performance. The experimental results of a case study on the optimal dispatch problem of China’s Wujiang cascade hydropower stations indicate that the proposed CBLSO can produce better and more reliable optimal results than the canonical LSO and other comparison algorithms with competitive speed. Thus, we can conclude that the proposed CBLSO is a competitive and effective alterative tool to solve complex numerical optimization problems and real-world optimization with complicated constraints.