This article presents a comprehensively state-of-the-art investigation of the engineering applications utilized by binary metaheuristic algorithms. Surveyed work is categorized based on application scenarios and solution encoding, and describes these algorithms in detail to help researchers choose appropriate methods to solve related applications. It is seen that transfer function is the main binary coding of metaheuristic algorithms, which usually adopts Sigmoid function. Among the contributions presented, there were different implementations and applications of metaheuristic algorithms, or the study of engineering applications by different objective functions such as the single- and multi-objective problems of feature selection, schedulin...