“…Following this tradition, in 2006, Mehrabian and Lucas proposed the Invasive Weed Optimization (IWO) [13], a derivative-free, metaheuristic algorithm, mimicking the ecological behavior of colonizing weeds. Since its inception, IWO has found successful applications in many practical optimization problems like optimization and tuning of a robust controller [13 ], optimal positioning of piezoelectric actuators [14], developing a recommender system [15], antenna configuration optimization [16], design of E-shaped MIMO Antenna [17], design of encoding sequences for DNA computing [18], and design of compact U-array MIMO antenna design [19].…”