Improved Multi-Strategy Sand Cat Swarm Optimization for Solving Global Optimization.

ABSTRACTThree‐dimensional path planning for UAV in complex terrains and obstacle‐limited areas is one of the major challenges faced during mission execution, requiring a simple yet effective algorithm. To solve such problems, an improved Sand Cat Swarm Optimization (SCSO) is proposed, addressing the issue where traditional SCSO is prone to getting stuck in local optima. In this improved approach, a nonlinear adjustment mechanism based on a dynamic factor k is introduced to better balance the exploration and exploitation phases. Additionally, the predatory attack strategy of Harris's Hawks was introduced to improve the position update formula during the exploration phase of the SCSO, thus enhancing the algorithm's convergence speed. A new variant of the SCSO, named HKSCSO, is proposed and applied to UAV path planning. Cost functions are introduced to evaluate path length, flight altitude, and angle comprehensively. HKSCSO's performance was tested in three 3D urban environments, showing faster convergence and safer paths compared to SCSO, Harris's Hawks Optimization (HHO), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Seagull Optimization Algorithm (SOA), Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), Parrot Optimizer (PO), and Mantis Search Algorithm (MSA). These results indicate HKSCSO's potential as an effective solution for UAV three‐dimensional path planning.

This paper presents a powerful swarm intelligence meta-heuristic optimization algorithm called Dynamic Cat Swarm Optimization. The formulation is through modifying the existing Cat Swarm Optimization. The original Cat Swarm Optimization suffers from the shortcoming of 'premature convergence', which is the possibility of entrapment in local optima which usually happens due to the off-balance between exploration and exploitation phases. Therefore, the proposed algorithm suggests a new method to provide a proper balance between these phases by modifying the selection scheme and the seeking mode of the algorithm. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, 23 classical test functions, 10 modern test functions (CEC 2019) and a real world scenario are used. In addition, the Dimension-wise diversity metric is used to measure the percentage of the exploration and exploitation phases. The optimization results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which ranks first compared to several well-known algorithms available in the literature. Furthermore, statistical methods and graphs are also used to further confirm the outperformance of the algorithm. Finally, the conclusion as well as future directions to further improve the algorithm are discussed.

The crow search algorithm (CSA) is a new intelligent optimization algorithm based on the behavior of the crow population, which has been proven to perform well. However, its simple search mechanism also leads to the algorithm's slow convergence speed and its ease of falling into local optimization when solving complex optimization problems. In order to overcome these problems, this paper proposes an improved CSA (ISCSA) based on a spiral search mechanism. By introducing a weight coefficient, an optimal guidance position and a spiral search mechanism, the position equation was updated to accelerate the convergence of the algorithm and make the exploration and exploitation of CSA more balanced. Meanwhile, adding Gaussian variation and random perturbation strategy made it difficult for the algorithm to fall into local optimization. The advantages of the proposed ISCSA were evaluated using 23 benchmark functions and four classical engineering design problems. The experimental and statistical results of 23 test functions showed that the proposed ISCSA could escape from the local optima with higher accuracy and faster convergence than both the CSA and other meta-heuristic optimization algorithms. The calculation results of the four engineering optimization problems showed that compared with other algorithms, ISCSA can solve the practical optimization problem well and has been proved to have strong competitiveness and good performance.

Optimizing resource allocation and routing to satisfy service needs is paramount in large-scale networks. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a new network paradigm that decouples forwarding and control, enabling dynamic management and configuration through programming, which provides the possibility for deploying intelligent control algorithms (such as deep reinforcement learning algorithms) to solve network routing optimization problems in the network. Although these intelligent-based network routing optimization schemes can capture network state characteristics, they are prone to falling into local optima, resulting in poor convergence performance. In order to address this issue, this paper proposes an African Vulture Routing Optimization (AVRO) algorithm for achieving SDN routing optimization. AVRO is based on the African Vulture Optimization Algorithm (AVOA), a population-based metaheuristic intelligent optimization algorithm with global optimization ability and fast convergence speed advantages. First, we improve the population initialization method of the AVOA algorithm according to the characteristics of the network routing problem to enhance the algorithm’s perception capability towards network topology. Subsequently, we add an optimization phase to strengthen the development of the AVOA algorithm and achieve stable convergence effects. Finally, we model the network environment, define the network optimization objective, and perform comparative experiments with the baseline algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that the routing algorithm has better network awareness, with a performance improvement of 16.9% compared to deep reinforcement learning algorithms and 71.8% compared to traditional routing schemes.

Arctic puffin optimization: A bio-inspired metaheuristic algorithm for solving engineering design optimization

Multi-strategy improved sand cat optimization algorithm-based workflow scheduling mechanism for heterogeneous edge computing environment

Improved random selection strategy, self-adaptive crossover and mutation operators, population co-evolution algorithm are adopted in this paper to set up a new genetic algorithm(GA), guaranteeing the universality of population, the thoroughness of solution and the execution efficiency of algorithm in solving multi-process, process crossover, work-piece flow and other condition based scheduling problem of flexible manufacturing system(FMS). The problem of GA in solving FMS scheduling is summarized in this paper, reasons and countermeasures for GA's pre-maturing are studied, longitudinal and transverse comprehensive state-based correlative self-adaptive crossover and mutation operators are raised according to the analysis on GA to avoid local optimization and pre-maturity, the co-evolutionary GA is designed to solve the scheduling model for FMS, and the algorithm is validated for the scheduling of box-type parts for precise machine tools.

A modified reptile search algorithm for global optimization and image segmentation: Case study brain MRI images

The sand cat swarm optimization (SCSO) is a new heuristic optimization algorithm that simulates the behavior of sand cat groups in the desert using hearing to hunt. To address the shortcomings of low accuracy of SCSO solution, slow convergence in late iterations and easy convergence stagnation, a sand cat swarm optimization based on stochastic variation and elite collaboration (SE-SCSO) is proposed. SE-SCSO first introduces a nonlinear periodic adjustment mechanism to balance the exploration and local exploitation ability of the algorithm and accelerate the convergence of the algorithm.Secondly, the pseudo-opposition and pseudo-reflection learning mechanisms are used to speed up the optimization-seeking efficiency of the SCSO algorithm and improve the global convergence capability. Designing elite collaborative strategies with random variation to enable the algorithm to jump away from the local extrema, further improving the algorithm’s optimization-seeking accuracy and convergence speed. In the simulation experiments, SE-SCSO is compared with Sand Cat Swarm Optimization (SCSO), Sine Cosine Algorithm (CSA), Circle Search Algorithm (SCA), Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA), Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO), Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), and Golden Jackal Optimization (GJO) are tested for comparison. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed improvement strategies. Finally, SE-SCSO is applied to three engineering optimization problems. The results show that the improved strategy can effectively improve the performance performance of the algorithm, which gives SE-SCSO the advantages of high convergence accuracy, fast convergence, and the ability to jump out of local optimal solutions.

Irrelevant features in data collected from oil refineries affect system performance due to conflicts between normal data and detected faults. Selecting the relevant features from the data leads to better classification results. Optimization algorithms are successfully applied in the feature selection task in many systems. One of the powerful optimization algorithms that is used for feature selection is the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), which is a nature-inspired metaheuristic optimization algorithm that mimics the social behavior of humpback whales. This study presents an improvement to WOA using a tent chaotic map to select the most relevant features and enhance performance. The Tent map mainly applies randomness to generate diversification into the search process and escape from local optima in WOA. The tent map is used for generating the initial population, producing values in control parameters, and updating the position of search agents. The proposed approach combines the tent map with WOA, called TWOA, to enrich population diversity, prevent premature convergence, and speed up convergence. TWOA is applied in a soft sensor with actual data collected from the Salahuddin oil refinery in Iraq. The soft sensor was designed using several stages, including data collection, preprocessing, clustering, feature selection, and classification. The proposed TWOA achieved a higher fault classification result of 99.98% compared to other algorithms.

Several optimization problems from various types of applications have been efficiently resolved using available meta-heuristic algorithms such as Particle Swarm Optimization and Genetic Algorithm. Recently, many meta-heuristic optimization techniques have been extensively reported in the literature. Nevertheless, there is still room for new optimization techniques and strategies since, according to the literature, there is no meta-heuristic optimization algorithm that may be considered as the best choice to cope with all modern optimization problems. This paper introduces a novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm named Dynamic Group-based Optimization Algorithm (DGCO). The proposed algorithm is inspired by the cooperative behavior adopted by swarm individuals to achieve their global goals. DGCO has been validated and tested against twenty-three mathematical optimization problems, and the results have been verified by a comparative study with respect to state-of-the-art optimization algorithms that are already available. The results have shown the high exploration capabilities of DGCO as well as its ability to avoid local optima. Moreover, the performance of DGCO has also been verified against five constrained engineering design problems. The results demonstrate the competitive performance and capabilities of DGCO with respect to well-known state-of-the-art meta-heuristic optimization algorithms. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed to study the effect of different parameters on the performance of the DGCO algorithm.

Time varying acceleration coefficients particle swarm optimisation (TVACPSO): A new optimisation algorithm for estimating parameters of PV cells and modules

Clustering is a NP-hard problem that is used to find the relationship between patterns in a given set of patterns. It is an unsupervised technique that is applied to obtain the optimal cluster centers, especially in partitioned based clustering algorithms. On the other hand, cat swarm optimization (CSO) is a new meta-heuristic algorithm that has been applied to solve various optimization problems and it provides better results in comparison to other similar types of algorithms. However, this algorithm suffers from diversity and local optima problems. To overcome these problems, we are proposing an improved version of the CSO algorithm by using opposition-based learning and the Cauchy mutation operator. We applied the opposition-based learning method to enhance the diversity of the CSO algorithm and we used the Cauchy mutation operator to prevent the CSO algorithm from trapping in local optima. The performance of our proposed algorithm was tested with several artificial and real datasets and compared with existing methods like K-means, particle swarm optimization, and CSO. The experimental results show the applicability of our proposed method.

The Sailfish Optimizer: A novel nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm for solving constrained engineering optimization problems

Cross-correlation stacking-based microseismic source location using three metaheuristic optimization algorithms