Adaptive guided salp swarm algorithm with velocity clamping mechanism for solving optimization problems

Abstract

Abstract Salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is a well-established population-based optimizer that exhibits strong exploration ability, but slow convergence and poor exploitation capability. In this paper, an endeavour is made to enhance the performance of the basic SSA. The new upgraded version of SSA named as ‘adaptive strategy-based SSA (ABSSA) algorithm’ is proposed in this paper. First, the exploratory scope and food source navigating commands of SSA are enriched using the inertia weight and boosted global best-guided mechanism. Next, a novel velocity clamping strategy is designed to efficiently stabilize the balance between the exploration and exploitation operations. In addition, an adaptive conversion parameter tactic is designed to modify the position update equation to effectively intensify the local exploitation competency and solution accuracy. The effectiveness of the proposed ABSSA algorithm is verified by a series of problems, including 23 classical benchmark functions, 29 complex optimization problems from CEC 2017, and five engineering design tasks. The experimental results show that the developed ABSSA approach performs significantly better than the standard SSA and other competitors. Moreover, ABSSA is implemented to handle path planning and obstacle avoidance (PPOA) tasks in autonomous mobile robots and compared with some swarm intelligent approach-based path planners. The experimental results indicate that the ABSSA-based PPOA method is a reliable path planning algorithm.