A new niche technique for multimodal function optimization using Shuffled Frog leaping algorithm

The niche methods for search algorithms are important techniques in optimization. Most niche techniques need some extra tunable parameters to get a better performance. Achieving a good method for multimodal optimization by heuristic algorithms will be possible if and only if the population diversity is preserved. Shuffled Frog leaping (SFL) algorithm is a new heuristic algorithm that its ability is not proved for solving the multimodal problems. This paper proposes a niche method for SFL. Several benchmark problems are considered for testing the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method over the results available in the literature. The results show that the proposed method performs well.