We present the use and implementation of the firefly algorithm to help in scanning the multiple metastable minima of orbital occupations in density functional theory (DFT) plus Hubbard U correction and to identify the ground state occupations in strongly correlated materials. We show the application of this implementation with the Abinit code on KCoF3 and UO2 crystals, which are typical d and f electron systems with numerous occupation minima. We demonstrate the validity and performance of the method by comparing with previous methodologies. The method is general and can be applied to any code using constrained occupation matrices.