TY - JOUR
T1 - Metaphor-based metaheuristics, a call for action
T2 - The elephant in the room
AU - Aranha, Claus
AU - Camacho-Villalón, Christian Leonardo
AU - Campelo, Felipe
AU - Dorigo, Marco
AU - Ruiz, Ruben
AU - Sevaux, Marc
AU - Sörensen, Kenneth
AU - Stützle, Thomas
N1 - This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
PY - 2022/3
Y1 - 2022/3
N2 - Taking inspiration from natural behaviors to devise new optimization algorithms has played an important role in the history of the field of metaheuristics (Sörensen et al. 2017). Unfortunately, in the last two decades we have been witnessing a new trend by which dozens of metaphor-based metaheuristics based on the most diverse possible set of natural, artificial, social, and sometimes even supernatural phenomena and behaviors are proposed, without a clear motivation beyond the desire of their authors to publish their papers. Despite several attempts (Sörensen 2015; Sörensen et al. 2019; Weyland 2010; Piotrowski et al. 2014; Fong et al. 2016; Camacho Villalón et al. 2019; Camacho Villalón et al. 2020; Swan et al. 2015; Lones 2020; Tzanetos and Dounias 2020) to put an end to the flood of increasingly outlandish, “novel” metaphor-centered metaheuristics, there is still a steady inflow of such papers submitted, and often accepted for publication. For many reasons, we believe this is detrimental to the field of metaheuristics. This letter describes some of the negative effects of publishing such papers in the literature and proposes a necessary action to try to put a limit to this highly undesirable phenomenon.
AB - Taking inspiration from natural behaviors to devise new optimization algorithms has played an important role in the history of the field of metaheuristics (Sörensen et al. 2017). Unfortunately, in the last two decades we have been witnessing a new trend by which dozens of metaphor-based metaheuristics based on the most diverse possible set of natural, artificial, social, and sometimes even supernatural phenomena and behaviors are proposed, without a clear motivation beyond the desire of their authors to publish their papers. Despite several attempts (Sörensen 2015; Sörensen et al. 2019; Weyland 2010; Piotrowski et al. 2014; Fong et al. 2016; Camacho Villalón et al. 2019; Camacho Villalón et al. 2020; Swan et al. 2015; Lones 2020; Tzanetos and Dounias 2020) to put an end to the flood of increasingly outlandish, “novel” metaphor-centered metaheuristics, there is still a steady inflow of such papers submitted, and often accepted for publication. For many reasons, we believe this is detrimental to the field of metaheuristics. This letter describes some of the negative effects of publishing such papers in the literature and proposes a necessary action to try to put a limit to this highly undesirable phenomenon.
UR - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11721-021-00202-9
U2 - 10.1007/s11721-021-00202-9
DO - 10.1007/s11721-021-00202-9
M3 - Article
SN - 1935-3812
VL - 16
SP - 1
EP - 6
JO - Swarm Intelligence
JF - Swarm Intelligence
ER -