“…WOA consists of three phases: encircling the prey, bubble-net attacking, and searching for the prey. WOA has been used to solve a wide range of optimization problems in different applications including feature selection [28], software defect prediction [29], clustering [30,31], classification [32,33], disease diagnosis [34], image segmentation [35,36], scheduling [37], forecasting [38,39], parameter estimation [40], global optimization [41], and photovoltaic energy generation systems [42,43]. Even though WOA is employed to tackle a wide variety of optimization problems, it still has flaws such as premature convergence, the imbalance between exploration and exploitation, and local optima stagnation [44,45].…”