HAGWO: A Hierarchical Adversarial Grey Wolf Optimizer and Its Application in the 3D Bin Packing Problem

The Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) is a popular metaheuristic, yet it often suffers from premature convergence and rapid diversity loss in complex, high-dimensional, or highly constrained optimization problems. This paper introduces HAGWO, a novel Hierarchical Adversarial Grey Wolf Optimizer that addresses these limitations through three synergistic enhancements: dynamic hierarchical population stratification, adaptive Levy flight perturbation, and hierarchical adversarial-like position updating. These mechanisms enable adaptive balancing of global exploration and local exploitation while preserving population diversity throughout the search process. Extensive experiments on the CEC 2017 bound-constrained benchmark suite across 30D, 50D, and 100D dimensions demonstrate that HAGWO achieves superior overall performance among eight state-of-the-art algorithms, with statistically significant advantages confirmed by Friedman mean ranks and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. When adapted to the strongly NP-hard three-dimensional bin packing problem with identical bins (3D-SBSBPP), HAGWO delivers highly competitive results, outperforming the well-established BRKGA and most other metaheuristics while closely approaching the original GWO in solution quality and exhibiting exceptional run-to-run stability. By rigorously evaluating HAGWO across both high-dimensional continuous benchmarks and a practical constrained combinatorial application, this study validates the effectiveness of its hierarchical adversarial-like framework and provides valuable insights into algorithm design and transferability across different problem domains.