ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the harmonic phenomena and improvisations in music that are being applied by musicians. It also investigates the memory mechanism the musicians apply for harmony and its application to harmony search (HS). The chapter presents Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) and different variants of HSA as well as applications of the HSA to engineering problems. The HSA was proved to be very successful and was able to attract many researchers to develop HS-based solutions for many optimization problems. Lee and Geem applied the algorithm to many unimodal, multimodal, and constrained optimization problems. Water system optimization is a challenging optimization problem for design engineers, which received considerable attention from the research community. The transmission network expansion planning (TNEP) problem is generally formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem. Attempts were made to apply HSA to solve NP-hard problems such as job shop scheduling problems (JSSP), which plays an important role in manufacturing and production systems.
