A velocity-guided Harris hawks optimizer for function optimization and fault diagnosis of wind turbine

Harris hawks optimizer (HHO) is a relatively novel meta-heuristic approach that mimics the behavior of Harris hawk over the process of predating the rabbits. The simplicity and easy implementation of HHO have attracted extensive attention of many researchers. However, owing to its capability to balance between exploration and exploitation is weak, HHO suffers from low precision and premature convergence. To tackle these disadvantages, an improved HHO called VGHHO is proposed by embedding three modifications. Firstly, a novel modified position search equation in exploitation phase is designed by introducing velocity operator and inertia weight to guide the search process. Then, a nonlinear escaping energy parameter E based on cosine function is presented to achieve a good transition from exploration phase to exploitation phase. Thereafter, a refraction-opposition-based learning mechanism is introduced to generate the promising solutions and helps the swarm to flee from the local optimal solution. The performance of VGHHO is evaluated on 18 classic benchmarks, 30 latest benchmark tests from CEC2017, 21 benchmark feature selection problems, fault diagnosis problem of wind turbine and PV model parameter estimation problem, respectively. The simulation results indicate that VHHO has higher solution quality and faster convergence speed than basic HHO and some well-known algorithms in the literature on most of the benchmark and real-world problems.