Hybrid Sine–Cosine with Hummingbird Foraging Algorithm for Engineering Design Optimisation

We introduce AHA–SCA, a compact hybrid optimiser that alternates the wave-based exploration of the Sine–Cosine Algorithm (SCA) with the exploitation skills of the Artificial Hummingbird Algorithm (AHA) within a single population. Even iterations perform SCA moves with a linearly decaying sinusoidal amplitude to explore widely around the current best solution, while odd iterations invoke guided and territorial hummingbird flights using axial, diagonal, and omnidirectional patterns to intensify the search in promising regions. This simple interleaving yields an explicit and tunable balance between exploration and exploitation and incurs negligible overhead beyond evaluating candidate solutions. The proposed approach is evaluated on the CEC2014, CEC2017, and CEC2022 benchmark suites and on several constrained engineering design problems, including welded beam, pressure vessel, tension/compression spring, speed reducer, and cantilever beam designs. Across these diverse tasks, AHA–SCA demonstrates competitive or superior performance relative to stand-alone SCA, AHA, and a broad panel of recent metaheuristics, delivering faster early-phase convergence and robust final solutions. Statistical analyses using non-parametric tests confirm that improvements are significant on many functions, and the method respects problem constraints without parameter tuning. The results suggest that alternating wave-driven exploration with hummingbird-inspired refinement is a promising general strategy for continuous engineering optimisation.