“…Perhaps, this feature must be stressed here since it distinguishes ESC from other offline approaches of finding the extremum value of a known objective function with or without constraints (Tlili 2021). With the explosion of interest in learning algorithms (Harkat et al 2020), for all sorts of purposes including optimization and recently even for control, it would be regrettable if it were overlooked that ESC is also a learning-based approach (in the minimalistic, most efficient sense of learning), a model-free approach (Carvalho et al 2023), and also a data-based approach (Bernardo et al 2023). The real-time capabilities, as well as the rigorous convergence guarantees which ESC possesses, are what machine learning and reinforcement learning algorithm have yet to achieve.…”