Chemical Reaction Optimization: a tutorial

Abstract

Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) is a recently established metaheuristics for optimization, inspired by the nature of chemical reactions. A chemical reaction is a natural process of transforming the unstable substances to the stable ones. In microscopic view, a chemical reaction starts with some unstable molecules with excessive energy. The molecules interact with each other through a sequence of elementary reactions. At the end, they are converted to those with minimum energy to support their existence. This property is embedded in CRO to solve optimization problems. CRO can be applied to tackle problems in both the discrete and continuous domains. We have successfully exploited CRO to solve a broad range of engineering problems, including the quadratic assignment problem, neural network training, multimodal continuous problems, etc. The simulation results demonstrate that CRO has superior performance when compared with other existing optimization algorithms. This tutorial aims to assist the readers in implementing CRO to solve their problems. It also serves as a technical overview of the current development of CRO and provides potential future research directions.

A Chemical Reaction Optimization Approach to Prioritize the Regression Test Cases of Object-Oriented Programs

“…Chemical reaction optimization (CRO) is an optimization algorithm that has recently been proposed in [14,15]. CRO includes a smart searching ability that shows glorious operation in 2 necessary options of improvement metaheuristics: intensification and diversification.…”

An optimization model for a monopolistic firm serving an environmentally conscious market: Use of chemical reaction optimization algorithm

“…Note, that the objective NetProfit is a non-linear function. To solve this NLP model, we use a novel Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) algorithm (Lam and Li, 2012) developed recently. Section 4 provides an overview of this method, discusses its various steps and justifies reasons for its adoption as a solution methodology.…”

Chemical Reaction Optimization for Feature Combination in Bio-inspired Visual Attention

“…CRO is a recently developed heuristic algorithm for optimization, inspired by the molecular behaviors in a chemical reaction 20 . Unlike other population-based metaheuristics, e.g., Artificial Bee Colony 21 , Differential Search 22 , Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) 23 and Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO) 24 , the size of population in CRO algorithm is not a constant in iterative process.…”

“…CRO simulates the whole process of a chemical reaction where molecules collide with the walls of a container (i.e., on-wall ineffective reaction and decomposition reaction) and with each other (i.e., inter-molecular reaction and synthesis reaction). In CRO algorithm, a molecule is the basic unit with several properties such as structure , potential energy P, kinetic energy K and some other user-defined properties for a particular problem, where represents a solution of the problem, P is the fitness value and K quantifies the capability of a molecule to escape from a local optimum 20 . In a chemical reaction, the initial reactants with excessive potential energy are finally turned into products with minimal potential energy through a series of interactions.…”

“…In each iteration, the type of reaction is chosen by the criteria described in Ref. [20]. Test whether this reaction satisfies two assumptions given in Eq.…”