Social Engineering Optimization (SEO); A New Single-Solution Meta-heuristic Inspired by Social Engineering

Although in recent years many meta-heuristic methods have been presented, most of them are based on population and bear many steps, several parameters and hard to understand and code. So, the researchers usually use the old algorithms instead of recent ones. Contrary to previous work, this paper aims to develop a simple, intelligent and new single-solution algorithm that has four main steps and just three simple parameters to tune. Social Engineering Optimization (SEO) starts with two initial solutions, divided into attacker and defender. The attacker obtains the rules of social engineering techniques to reach desired its goals. The basis of the algorithm is to how an attacker attacks to defender by four different associated techniques. Finally, the proposed SEO is applied to solve some benchmark functions and an engineering problem and also the results show its superiority in comparison with other well-known and recent meta-heuristic.