Aiming at the problem of slow convergence speed and ease of falling into local optimum when solving high dimensional problems, this paper proposes an improved chicken swarm optimization algorithm. The improved chicken swarm optimization includes four aspects, namely, cock position update mode, hen position update mode, chick position update mode, and population update strategy, so it is abbreviated as ICSO-RHC. On the basis of algorithm improvement, the influence of the number of retained elite individuals and control parameters on the convergence speed of the algorithm is discussed. The calculation results of the test function show that when the number of elite individuals in the population is 1, and the control parameters is a random number uniformly distributed between [0, 1], the algorithm has a faster convergence speed. In addition, in order to verify the performance of ICSO-RHC, 30 test functions and CEC 2005 benchmark functions were selected. The calculation results of these test functions show that the success rate of ICSO-RHC is significantly higher than other algorithms, both for low-dimensional and highdimensional optimization problems. The average iteration number and average running time are significantly lower than other algorithms. Finally, ICSO-RHC and other improved algorithms in the literature are used to optimize the parameters of four practical engineering problems. The optimization results show that the statistical results obtained by ICSO-RHC are significantly better than other algorithms. The calculation results of the test functions and the actual engineering problems show that the performance of ICSO-RHC proposed in this paper is significantly better than other algorithms.INDEX TERMS Constrained optimization problem, chicken swarm optimization, rooster position update, hen position update, chick position update.