One of the primary goals of optimization approaches is to strike a balance between exploitation and exploration strategies, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the search process. To improve this balance, considerable research efforts have been directed towards refining these strategies. This paper introduces a novel exploration approach for the Black Widow Optimization (BWO) algorithm, termed Improved BWO (IBWO), aimed at achieving a robust equilibrium between global and local search strategies. The proposed approach tracks and remembers the effective research areas during the research iteration and uses them to direct the subsequent research process toward the most promising areas of the search space. Consequently, this method facilitates convergence towards optimal global solutions, leading to the generation of higher-quality solutions. To evaluate its performance, IBWO is compared with five optimization techniques, including BWO, GA, PSO, ABC, and BBO, across 39 benchmark functions. Simulation results demonstrate that IBWO consistently maintains precision in performance, achieving superior fitness values in 87.2%, 74.4%, and 69.2% of total trials across three distinct simulation settings. These outcomes underscore the efficacy of IBWO in effectively leveraging prior search space information to enhance the balance between exploitation and exploration capabilities. The proposed IBWO has broad applicability, addressing real-world optimization challenges in pilgrim crowd management and transportation during Hajj, supply chain logistics, and energy distribution optimization.

Energy-saving design is becoming a trending topic and top-priority over the past decades due to high energy costs, limited available resources and growing urban development. Buildings are alluded to as the major contributors of energy consumption and environmental emissions across the globe. This calls for the development of precise forecasting models of energy consumption and carbon emissions. Hence, this research paper harnesses the implementation of several contemporary metaheuristics to accurately project heating and cooling energy (HEN and CEN) in residential buildings. In this respect, black widow optimization, dandelion optimization, dingo optimization, sparrow search, and red-tailed hawk optimization are among the studied metaheuristics in this research study. The prediction accuracies of the developed models are assessed stepping on the measures of i) relative absolute error (RAE), ii) mean absolute error (MAE), iii) mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), iv) root mean squared error (RMSE) and v) Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE). It is shown that the developed red-tailed hawk optimization-based model succeeded in accomplishing the most precise results of HEN and CEN. In this context, it predicted HEN with RAE (0.201), MAE (1.838), MAPE (7.626%), RMSE (2.826), and NSE (0.921). Besides, it anticipated CEN with RAE (0.234), MAE (2.009), MAPE (7.519%), RMSE (3.246), and NSE (0.883). It can be argued that this research study could benefit architects and designers in creating more energy-efficient buildings at an early stage.