A modified League Championship Algorithm for numerical function optimization via artificial modeling of the “between two halves analysis”

Inspired by the competition of sport teams in a sport league, the League Championship Algorithm (LCA) has been introduced recently for optimizing nonlinear continuous functions. LCA tries to metaphorically model a league championship environment wherein a number of individuals, as artificial sport teams, play in pairs in an artificial league for several weeks (iterations) based on a league schedule. Given the playing strength (fitness value) along with a team intended formation (solution) in each week, the game outcome is determined in terms of win or loss and this will serve as a basis to direct the search toward fruitful areas. At the heart of LCA is the artificial post-match analysis where, to generate a new solution, the algorithm imitates form the strengths/ weaknesses/ opportunities/ threats (SWOT) based analysis followed typically by coaches to develop a new team formation for their next week contest. In this paper we try to modify the basic algorithm via modeling a between two halves like analysis beside the postmatch SWOT analysis to generate new solutions. Performance of the modified algorithm is tested with that of basic version and the particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) on finding the global minimum of a number of benchmark functions. Results testify that the improved algorithm called RLCA, performs well in terms of both final solution quality and convergence speed.