Water Drop Algorithms

This article presents a review of a novel nature-inspired adaptive optimization algorithm known as Water Drop Algorithm (WDA) which imitates the dynamics of river systems and the behavior of water drops when they are moving in a river system such as the variation of velocity, the change of sediment/soil in the river bed, the change of direction of the flow, and so on. Recent improved, modified, and adaptive WDAs are examined in this paper. Various applications of WDA are described briefly including the vehicle routing problem, economic load dispatch problem, economic and emission dispatch problem, optimal data aggregation tree in wireless networks, reactive power dispatch problem service selection, and reservoir operation.