🤖 AI Summary
This study systematically evaluates the closed-loop resource allocation mechanism of the Metabolic Multi-Agent Optimizer (MMAO) under a unified and strict budget constraint, demonstrating its effectiveness across both continuous and discrete optimization problems. Leveraging benchmark suites from CEC2017, TSPLIB, and OR-Library, the authors conduct large-scale empirical assessments against strong baselines—including PSO-lite, ES-lite, and iterative greedy 2-opt—to establish MMAO as the first cross-domain adaptive framework of its kind. Through trajectory-level diagnostics and ablation studies, the work reveals the robustness of MMAO’s endogenous resource reallocation capability. Results show that MMAO significantly outperforms baseline methods on both problem types, while ablated variants exhibit performance nearly matching the full model, confirming its ability to dynamically and efficiently allocate computational resources even under stringent budget limitations.
📝 Abstract
This paper evaluates the Metabolic Multi-Agent Optimizer (MMAO) under a stricter empirical protocol rather than reintroducing the framework itself. The study asks whether MMAO's closed-loop resource-allocation principle remains credible under broader, more standard, and more explicitly budget-controlled continuous and discrete benchmarks. The main completed matrix covers eight CEC2017 functions at 10D and 30D with 20 seeds each, and five TSPLIB instances with 20 seeds each, together with stronger reproducible baselines including PSO-lite, ES-lite, and an iterated-greedy 2-opt route baseline. We further add trajectory-level diagnostics for communal budget, success rate, role evolution, and population turnover, plus an auxiliary OR-Library multiple-knapsack slice to extend the discrete evidence beyond routing. Under this protocol, MMAO clearly outperforms the external baseline set on the continuous side and on the TSPLIB side, while the ablation variants remain much closer to the full method than the external baselines are. We therefore position MMAO as a benchmark-backed cross-domain adaptive framework whose most clearly validated value is endogenous resource redistribution under evidence pressure, while also noting that the strongest remaining gap is not basic workability but sharper mechanism isolation and broader competition-grade comparison.