Grenade Explosion Method-A novel tool for optimization of multimodal functions

This work presents a new optimization technique called Grenade Explosion Method (GEM). The fundamental concepts and ideas which underlie the method are fully explained. It is seen that this simple and robust algorithm is quite powerful in finding all global and some local optima of multimodal functions. The method is tested with several multimodal benchmark functions and the results show it usually converges to the global minima faster than other evolutionary methods such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC). Based on the performance on classical benchmark functions, the efficiency of the method in solving engineering applications can be highly appreciated. (C) 2009 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.