An improved immune plasma algorithm with a regional pandemic restriction

The coronavirus (COVID-19) and its global effect have increased the interests of researchers from different disciplines to the medical methods such as immune or convalescent plasma treatment. Immune Plasma algorithm (IPA) that is the first meta-heuristic referencing the steps of the immune plasma treatment as the name implies has been proposed recently and its potential has been investigated. In this study, a pandemic management strategy based on limiting the free movements between regions was modeled and integrated into the workflow of the IPA and a new variant called regional IPA (rIPA) was introduced. For analyzing the contribution of the proposed method, twelve numerical benchmark problems were solved. Also, the performance of the rIPA was investigated by solving a new big data optimization problem that requires minimization of the measurement noise of electroencephalography signals. The results obtained by the rIPA were compared with the fourteen well-known and state-of-art meta-heuristics. Comparative studies showed that managing the relationship between the individuals of the population as in the proposed regional model significantly contributes to the capabilities and rIPA outperforms other meta-heuristics for most of the test cases.