“…In the majority of real-world optimization problems, a large number of decision variables are interacted with together, which is a very time-consuming process for finding an exact solution [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]. Metaheuristic algorithms have been widely used in recent years to approximate near-optimal solutions for real-world problems in various applications such as discrete optimization [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ], continuous optimization [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ], and constrained engineering problems [ 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ]. Moreover, a novel research field has emerged in this area which successfully combines machine learning and swarm intelligence approaches to obtain outstanding results in different areas [ 34 , 35 , 36 ].…”