Modified Harmony Methods for Slope Stability Problems - Music-Inspired Harmony Search Algorithm: Theory and Applications - page 158

The efficiency of a global optimization algorithm is another important factor to be
considered. A majority of the global optimization methods will also require tremen-
dous evaluations for large scale optimization analysis. The author has tested the pro-
posed algorithms to a maximum 160 control variables (sufficient for most of the slope
stability analyses) and have found that the proposed algorithms are still efficient and
have performed satisfactorily. It is true that the original harmony method is usually
more efficient than the modified methods for simple and small problems, but the
original harmony method suffers from the limitation of being trapped by the presence
of local minimum for the large scale problems.
The modified harmony algorithms and the trick in generating a random number
with weighting to different zones have been proved to be highly effective in geotech-
nical engineering. The present algorithms are however not limited to geotechnical
problems, and such algorithms should be applicable to general optimization problems.
For the testing of the efficiency and effectiveness of the modified harmony search
method, and the readers can download the demo program [23].
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