“…The firefly algorithm (FA) was firstly proposed by Yang et al (2008Yang et al ( , 2011Yang et al ( , 2012 [16,17,18], based on which, some further works on FA have been performed by a few researchers. For its characteristics of few input parameters, easy to understand, and implement, it has been applied to various [21] proposed a quantum-inspired firefly algorithm with particle swarm optimisation, which adapted the firefly approach to solving discrete optimisation problems. Besides, some works on a few nature-inspired meta-heuristics and applications have been carried out, such as: Water wave optimisation [23], population classification in fire evacuation [24], rapid learning algorithm for vehicle classification [26], multi-objective optimisation for spatial-temporal efficiency in a heterogeneous cloud environment [27], multiobjective artificial wolf-pack algorithm [28], etc.…”