Survey Paper: Whale optimization algorithm and its variant applications

Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) proposed by Seyedali Mirjalili and Andrew Lewis in 2016 is popular and powerful metaheuristic algorithm to search the global solution of optimization problems. WOA is nature-inspired, metaheuristic (randomization and deterministic) algorithm, which has been widely used to solve various single objective, multi objective and multidimensional optimization problems. WOA and its variant have been introduced in engineering applications, bioinformatics, multi-level image segmentation, clustering applications, design of low pass filter, Email classification, Diabetes classification, heterogeneous networks, machine learning etc. WOA is gradient free, easy to represent, capable to explore, exploit the search space and able to avoid local optima. This paper presents overview of WOA, its variants and applications. The performance of WOA is enhanced by introducing hybridization of other methods with WOA such as WOA-PSO, WOA-Levy, WOA-BAT, WOA-ANN, WOA-SVM etc. Objective of metaheuristic algorithm is tofind best position or leader position X* which is near to optimal solution for target prey over successive iteration. Objective function could be based on minimization or maximization approach.