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Exploration, the process of visiting a new region in a search space, and exploitation, the process of searching in the neighborhood of previously visited regions, are two centerpieces of any metaheuristic algorithm. It is a common belief that good results can be obtained only if there is a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Hence, there is an urgent need to control the balance between exploration and exploitation in a direct manner. But, currently, direct measures of exploration and exploitation are almost non-existent, and researchers rely on indirect measures of exploration and exploitation, such as diversity, entropy, and fitness improvements. To remedy this situation, in this paper, a novel direct measure of exploration and exploitation is proposed that is based on attraction basins—parts of a search space where each part has its own point called an attractor, to which neighboring points tend to evolve …