Biogeographic harmony search for emergency air transportation
Harmony search (HS) and biogeography-based optimization (BBO) are two metaheuristic optimization methods which have demonstrated effectiveness on a wide variety of optimization problems. The paper proposes a new hybrid biogeographic harmony search (BHS) method, which integrates the blended migration operator of BBO with HS to enrich harmony diversity, and thus achieves a much better balance between exploration and exploitation. We then apply the BHS method to an emergency air transportation problem, and show that the proposed method is very competitive with the state-of-the-art BBO, HS, and other comparative algorithms on a set of problem instances from real-world disaster relief operations in China.