ct 8 Harmony search (HS) is a new meta-heuristic optimization method imitating the music improvisation process where 9 musicians improvise their instruments' pitches searching for a perfect state of harmony. A new variant of HS, called 10 global-best harmony search (GHS), is proposed in this paper where concepts from swarm intelligence are borrowed to 11 enhance the performance of HS. The performance of the GHS is investigated and compared with HS and a recently devel12 oped variation of HS. The experiments conducted show that the GHS generally outperformed the other approaches when 13 applied to ten benchmark problems. The effect of noise on the performance of the three HS variants is investigated and a 14 scalability study is conducted. The effect of the GHS parameters is analyzed. Finally, the three HS variants are compared 15 on several Integer Programming test problems. The results show that the three approaches seem to be an efficient alterna16 tive for solving Integer Progr...
Mahamed G. H. Omran, Mehrdad Mahdavi