Abstract: The reptile search algorithm (RSA) is a dynamic and effective meta-heuristic algorithm inspired by the behavior of crocodiles in nature and the way of hunting prey. Unlike other crawler search algorithms, it uses four novel mechanisms to update the location of the solutions, such as walking at high or on the belly, and hunting in a coordinated or cooperative manner. In this algorithm, the total number of iterations is divided into four intervals, and different position-updating strategies are used to make the algorithm easily fall into the local optimum. Therefore, an improved reptile search algorithm based on a mathematical optimization accelerator (MOA) and elementary functions is proposed to improve its search efficiency and make it not easily fall into local optimum. MOA was used to realize the switching of RSA’s four searching modes by introducing random perturbations of six elementary functions (sine function, cosine function, tangent function, arccosine function, hyperbolic secant function and hyperbolic cosecant function), four mechanisms are distinguished by random number instead of the original RSA algorithm’s inherent four mechanisms by iteration number, which increases the randomness of the algorithm and avoids falling into local optimum. The random perturbations generated by elementary functions are added to the variation trend of parameter MOA to improve the optimization accuracy of the algorithm. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, 30 benchmark functions in CEC2017 were used for carrying out simulation experiments, and the optimization performance was compared with BAT, PSO, ChOA, MRA and SSA. Finally, two practical engineering design problems are optimized. Simulation results show that the proposed sechRSA has strong global optimization ability.
