Self-Organizing Migrating Algorithm with narrowing search space strategy for robot path planning

Abstract

This article introduces a version of the Self-Organizing Migrating Algorithm with a narrowing search space strategy named iSOMA. Compared to the previous two versions, SOMA T3A and Pareto that ranked 3rd and 5th respectively in the IEEE CEC (Congress on Evolutionary Computation) 2019 competition, the iSOMA is equipped with more advanced features with notable improvements including applying jumps in the order, immediate update, narrowing the search space instead of searching on the intersecting edges of hyperplanes, and the partial replacement of individuals in the population when the global best improved no further. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is organized into processes named initialization, self-organizing, migrating, and replacement. We tested the performance of this new version by using three benchmark test suites of IEEE CEC 2013, 2015, and 2017, which, together contain a total of 73 functions. Not only is it superior in performance to other SOMAs, but iSOMA also yields promising results against the representatives of well-known algorithmic families such as Differential Evolution and Particle Swarm Optimization. Moreover, we demonstrate the application of iSOMA for path planning of a drone, while avoiding static obstacles and catching the target.