Cuckoo search (CS) is a novel biologically inspired algorithm and has been widely applied to many fields. Although some binary-coded CS variants are developed to solve 0–1 knapsack problems, the search accuracy and the convergence speed are still needed to further improve. According to the analysis of the shortcomings of the standard CS and the advantage...

Moth search (MS) algorithm, originally proposed to solve continuous optimization problems, is a novel bio-inspired metaheuristic algorithm. At present, there seems to be little concern about using MS to solve discrete optimization problems. One of the most common and efficient ways to discretize MS is to use a transfer function, which is in charge of mapping a continuous search space to a discrete search space. In this paper, twelve transfer functions divided into three families, S-shaped (named S1, S2, S3, and S4), V-shaped (named V1, V2, V3, and V4), and other shapes (named O1, O2, O3, and O4), are combined with MS, and then twelve discrete versions MS algorithms are proposed for solving set-union knapsack problem (SUKP). Three groups of fifteen SUKP instances are employed to evaluate the importance of these transfer functions. The results show that O4 is the best transfer function when combined with MS to solve SUKP. Meanwhile, the importance of the transfer function in terms of improving the quality of solutions and convergence rate is demonstrated as well.

As a significant subset of the family of discrete optimization problems, the 0-1 knapsack problem (0-1 KP) has received considerable attention among the relevant researchers. The monarch butterfly optimization (MBO) is a recent metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the migration behavior of monarch butterflies. The original MBO is proposed to solve continuous optimization problems. This paper presents a novel monarch butterfly optimization with a global position updating operator (GMBO), which can address 0-1 KP known as an NP-complete problem. The global position updating operator is incorporated to help all the monarch butterflies rapidly move towards the global best position. Moreover, a dichotomy encoding scheme is adopted to represent monarch butterflies for solving 0-1 KP. In addition, a specific two-stage repair operator is used to repair the infeasible solutions and further optimize the feasible solutions. Finally, Orthogonal Design (OD) is employed in order to find the most suitable parameters. Two sets of low-dimensional 0-1 KP instances and three kinds of 15 high-dimensional 0-1 KP instances are used to verify the ability of the proposed GMBO. An extensive comparative study of GMBO with five classical and two state-of-the-art algorithms is carried out. The experimental results clearly indicate that GMBO can achieve better solutions on almost all the 0-1 KP instances and significantly outperforms the rest.