Salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is a recently proposed, powerful swarm-intelligence based optimizer, which is inspired by the unique foraging style of salps in oceans. However, the original SSA suffers from some limitations including immature balance between exploitation and exploration operators, slow convergence and local optimal stagnation. To alleviate these deficiencies, a modified SSA (called VC-SSA) with velocity clamping strategy, reduction factor tactic, and adaptive weight mechanism is developed. Firstly, a novel velocity clamping mechanism is designed to boost the exploitation ability and the solution accuracy. Next, a reduction factor is arranged to bolster the exploration capability and accelerate the convergence speed. Finally, a novel position update equation is designed by injecting an inertia weight to catch a better balance between local and global search. 23 classical benchmark test problems, 30 complex optimization tasks from CEC 2017, and five engineering design problems are employed to authenticate the effectiveness of the developed VC-SSA. The experimental results of VC-SSA are compared with a series of cutting-edge metaheuristics. The comparisons reveal that VC-SSA provides better performance against the canonical SSA, SSA variants, and other well-established metaheuristic paradigms. In addition, VC-SSA is utilized to handle a mobile robot path planning task. The results show that VC-SSA can provide the best results compared to the competitors and it can serve as an auxiliary tool for mobile robot path planning.
Keywords: engineering design optimization; numerical optimization; robot path planning; salp swarm algorithm; swarm intelligence.