Abstract

In the fields of engineering and science, there are many combinatorial optimization problems. Many of these problems are NP-hard problems, which are difficult to solve with complete techniques. Therefore, the design of binary algorithms based on swarm intelligence continuous metaheuristics is an area of interest in operations research. In this article, we use a general binarization mechanism based on the k-means technique. We apply k-means technique to the firefly algorithm to solve the multidimensional knapsack problem (MKP). Design experiments to prove the practicality of k-means technique in binarization.