A Global Optimization Algorithm Based on Plant Growth Theory: Plant Growth Optimization

A novel optimization algorithm, plant growth optimization (PGO), is proposed in this paper. According to the plant growth characteristics, an artificial plant growth model is built including leaf growth, branching, phototropism and spatial occupancy. Afterward, two mechanisms are introduced and the basic process of PGO is presented in details. Three classical test problems are adopted to test the performance of this new algorithm and the results show that it is very effective to get global optimum solution which benefits from its search mechanism. Furthermore, the effects of population size on optimization performance are also discussed.