Predicting the Mechanical Properties of Heat-Treated Woods Using Optimization-Algorithm-Based BPNN

Abstract

This paper aims to enhance the accuracy of predicting the mechanical behavior of wood subjected to thermal modification using an improved dung beetle optimization (IDBO) model. The IDBO algorithm improves the original DBO algorithm via three main steps: (1) using piece-wise linear chaotic mapping (PWLCM) to generate the initial dung beetle species and increase its heterogeneity; (2) adopting an adaptive nonlinear decreasing producer ratio model to control the number of producers and boost the algorithm’s convergence rate; and (3) applying a dimensional learning-enhanced foraging (DLF) search strategy that optimizes the algorithm’s ability to explore and exploit the search space. The IDBO algorithm is evaluated on 14 benchmark functions and outperforms other algorithms. The IDBO algorithm is then applied to optimize a back-propagation (BP) neural network for predicting five mechanical property parameters of heat-treated larch-sawn timber. The results indicate that the IDBO-BP model significantly reduces the error compared with the BP, tent-sparrow search algorithm (TSSA)-BP, grey wolf optimizer (GWO)-BP, nonlinear adaptive grouping grey wolf optimizer (IGWO)-BP and DBO-BP models, demonstrating its superiority in predicting the physical characteristics of lumber after heat treatment.