In this paper, a new population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm, named Simulated Kalman Filter (SKF) is introduced. This new algorithm is inspired by the estimation capability of the Kalman Filter. In principle, state estimation problem is regarded as an optimization problem, and each agent in SKF acts as a Kalman Filter. An agent in the population finds solution to optimization problem using a standard Kalman Filter framework, which includes a simulated measurement process and a best-so-far solution as a reference. To evaluate the performance of the Simulated Kalman Filter algorithm, it is applied to 30 benchmark functions of CEC 2014 for real-parameter single objective optimization problems. Statistical analysis is then carried out to rank SKF results to those obtained by other metaheuristic algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed SKF algorithm is a promising approach, and has a comparable performance to some well-known metaheuristic algorithms.

Simulated Kalman filter (SKF) is an optimization algorithm which is inspired by Kalman filtering method. SKF was introduced as synchronous population-based algorithm. This work introduced a new variation of SKF which is SKF with asynchronous update mechanism, asynchronous-SKF (ASKF). In contrast to the synchronous implementation where the whole population go through each optimization step as a group, in ASKF an agent starts its optimization steps only after its preceding agent has completed all optimization steps. The performance of ASKF is compared against SKF using CEC2014 benchmark functions, where the ASKF is found to perform significantly better than the original SKF.