ABSTRACT
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic is causing once-in-a-century upheavals in global civilization. Payment systems have advanced lately, from simple cash or credit card transactions to various forms of mobile payment systems. This transformation is occurred due to COVID 19 and shifts in the economy, the growth of social networks, technical advancements on the Internet, and the increased usage of mobile devices. Throughout COVID19, this article offers a unique approach to the payment scheduling issue, which seeks out a timetable that enhances the project's stakeholders' benefit. Both the sponsor and the contractor in a project want to have a strong payment plan on their own. To create an equal schedule between the sponsor and the development team, the timing of payments and the completion periods of project activities are decided concurrently. The Harris hawks optimization method is designed to tackle the problem because of its high NP-hardness. Harris hawks optimization is a novel meta-heuristic nature-inspired optimizer inspired by how Harris hawks hunt food in nature. By comparing the suggested Harris hawks optimization optimizer to existing nature-inspired methods, the efficacy of the suggested Harris hawks optimization optimizer is determined. The Harris hawks optimization algorithm appears to be highly promising based on the statistical findings and comparisons. The MATLAB simulator's simulation findings confirm the algorithm's superiority over earlier efforts regarding energy, cost, delay time, and net value. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.