MSAO: A multi-strategy boosted snow ablation optimizer for global optimization and real-world engineering applications

Snow Ablation Optimizer (SAO) is a cutting-edge nature-inspired meta-heuristic technique that mimics the sublimation and melting processes of snow in its quest for optimal solution to complex problems. While SAO has demonstrated competitive performance in comparison to classical algorithms in early research, it still exhibits certain limitations including low convergence accuracy, a lack of population diversity, and premature convergence, particularly when addressing high-dimensional intricate challenges. To mitigate the above-mentioned adverse factors, this paper introduces a novel variant of SAO with featuring four enhancement strategies collectively referred as MSAO. Firstly, the good point set initialization strategy is employed to generate a uniformly distributed high-quality population, which facilitates the algorithm to enter the appropriate search domain rapidly. Secondly, the greedy selection method is adopted to reserve better candidate solutions for the next iteration, thus striking a robust exploration–exploitation balance. Then, the Differential Evolution (DE) scheme is introduced to expand the search range and enhance the exploitation capability of the algorithm for higher convergence accuracy. Finally, to reduce the risk of falling into local optima, a Dynamic Lens Opposition-Based Learning (DLOBL) strategy is developed to operate on the current optimal solution dimension by dimension. With the blessing of these strategies, the optimization performance of MSAO is comprehensively improved. To comprehensively evaluate the optimization performance of MSAO, a series of numerical optimization experiments are conducted using the IEEE CEC2017 & CEC2022 test sets. In the IEEE CEC2017 experiments, the optimal crossover probability CR=0.8 is determined and the effectiveness of each improvement strategy is ablatively verified. MSAO is compared with the basic SAO, various state-of-the-art optimizers, and CEC2017 champion algorithms in terms of solution accuracy, convergence speed, robustness, and scalability. In the IEEE CEC2022 experiments, MSAO is compared with some recently developed improved algorithms to further validate its superiority. The results demonstrate that MSAO has excellent overall optimization performance, with the smallest Friedman mean rankings of 1.66 and 1.25 on both test suites, respectively. In the majority of test cases, MSAO can provide more accurate and reliable solutions than other competitors. Furthermore, six realistic constrained engineering design challenges and one photovoltaic model parameter estimation issue are employed to demonstrate the practicality of MSAO. Our findings suggest that MSAO has excellent optimization capacity and broad application potential.