Abstract

The NP-hard problems are of interest in operations research and particularly the combinatorial problems. Therefore, the design of efficient algorithms that address these combinatorial problems are active lines of research. Inspired by the above, this article designs a binarization method so that continuous metaheuristics can solve combinatorial problems. The binarization method uses the concept of percentile. This method of percentile is applied to the firefly algorithm. The multidimensional knapsack problem (MKP) was used to verify our algorithm.