From the evolutionary algorithms perspective, the work presented in the article is tremendously ordinary, even formulaic. There’s always somebody publishing a new evolutionary search operator with a flavor of the month biological analogy. The test functions are bog standard, and although they’re designed to present certain difficulties, they do a pretty bad job of resembling actual black box engineering models; their main advantages are fast evaluation and analytically known optima. Your best bet for single objective optimization is probably still CMAES.