A Multi-strategy Enhanced Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm and Its Application in Path Planning of Mobile Robots

A multi-strategy enhanced arithmetic optimization algorithm called MSEAOA is proposed to address the issues of low population diversity, imbalanced exploration and exploitation capabilities, and low accuracy of optimal solution in the Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm. Firstly, using the good point set strategy for population initialization to improve population diversity and thus accelerate convergence speed. Secondly, we integrate the exploration and exploition capabilities of differential self-learning strategy, best example learning strategy, and second-order differential perturbation strategy balancing algorithm. Finally, the introduction of somersault foraging strategy improves the accuracy of the optimal solution. We select 14 classical benchmark test functions and the CEC2019 function test set to test the optimization ability of MSEAOA, and apply MSEAOA to the path planning problem of mobile robots. MSEAOA is compared with other meta-heuristic optimization algorithms, and the experimental results are statistically analyzed by the Wilcoxon rank-sum test. The simulation experimental results show that MSEAOA performs the best among 14 benchmark functions, but for 10 CEC2019 functions, MSEAOA has the best optimization performance among 5 of them (50%). In the path optimization problem of mobile robots, the path obtained by MSEAOA is also the best among all algorithms, its path shortening rate exceeds 8.8% in 83% of environments. The results indicate that MSEAOA is a reliable algorithm suitable for function optimization and practical optimization problems.