A survey and recent advances in black widow optimization: variants and applications

Artificial Intelligence techniques, such as optimization algorithms, have become essential for success in many fields. Therefore, most researchers, especially in computer and engineering sciences, focused their efforts and abilities on adapting the optimization algorithms for solving various problems. This review introduces one of the recent nature-inspired optimization algorithms, called black widow optimization (BWO). This review highlights the main procedures of BWO, its strengths and weaknesses, the growth of BWO, the variants of BWO ( i.e., binary, modification, and hybridization), and the efficiency of BWO in different fields and applications (i.e., feature selection, medical, image processing, engineering, IoT, power and energy, and networks). As a result, the review seeks to assist researchers who are interested in using the BWO to address their challenges. For instance, it could help manage large pilgrim crowds, enabling smoother ritual performances and overcoming potential difficulties they encounter. Also, it suggests new possible ways of enhancing the efficiency of the basic BWO.