Today, natural resources are more scarce than ever, so we must make good use of them. To achieve this goal, we can use metaheuristic optimization tools as an alternative to achieve good results in a reasonable amount of time. The present work focuses on the use of adaptive techniques to facilitate the use of this type of tool to obtain good functional parameters. We use a constructive metaheuristic algorithm called Intelligent Water Drops to solve the set covering problem. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method, the obtained results were compared with the standard version using the same initial configuration for both algorithms. Additionally, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov-Lilliefors, Wilcoxon signed-rank and Violin chart tests were applied to statistically validate the results, which showed that metaheuristics with autonomous search have a better behavior than do standard algorithms.