Biogeography-based optimization in noisy environments

Biogeography-based optimization (BBO) is a new evolutionary optimization algorithm that is based on the science of biogeography. In this paper, BBO is applied to the optimization of problems in which the fitness function is corrupted by random noise. Noise interferes with the BBO immigration rate and emigration rate, and adversely affects optimization performance. We analyse the effect of noise on BBO using a Markov model. We also incorporate re-sampling in BBO, which samples the fitness of each candidate solution several times and calculates the average to alleviate the effects of noise. BBO performance on noisy benchmark functions is compared with particle swarm optimization (PSO), differential evolution (DE), self-adaptive DE (SaDE) and PSO with constriction (CPSO). The results show that SaDE performs best and BBO performs second best. In addition, BBO with re-sampling is compared with Kalman filter-based BBO (KBBO). The results show that BBO with re-sampling achieves almost the same performance as KBBO but consumes less computational time.