Yuanfei Wei

The workshop is a crucial site for ensuring the smooth operation of production activities within an enterprise, playing a significant role in its long–term development. A well–designed workshop layout can reduce material–handling costs during production and enhance the overall efficiency of the enterprise. This paper establishes a mathematical model for the workshop layout problem, aiming to minimize logistics transportation costs and maximize non–logistics relationships. Using a real–world case study, the White Shark Optimizer (WSO) algorithm is applied to solve the model. The results show that the transportation distance of the layout scheme obtained by the WSO algorithm is reduced by 381 m, 82 m, and 56 m, respectively, compared with the original layout, the Genetic Algorithm (GA), and the Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA), and the non–logical relationship is increased by 24.84% and 1.6%, respectively. The layout scheme obtained by using the WSO algorithm is more excellent and can effectively improve the production efficiency of enterprises.

With the wide application of mobile robots, mobile robot path planning (MRPP) has attracted the attention of scholars, and many metaheuristic algorithms have been used to solve MRPP. Swarm-based algorithms are suitable for solving MRPP due to their population-based computational approach. Hence, this paper utilizes the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) to address the problem, aiming to improve the solution accuracy. Whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is an algorithm that imitates whale foraging behavior, and the firefly algorithm (FA) is an algorithm that imitates firefly behavior. This paper proposes a hybrid firefly-whale optimization algorithm (FWOA) based on multi-population and opposite-based learning using the above algorithms. This algorithm can quickly find the optimal path in the complex mobile robot working environment and can balance exploitation and exploration. In order to verify the FWOA’s performance, 23 benchmark functions have been used to test the FWOA, and they are used to optimize the MRPP. The FWOA is compared with ten other classical metaheuristic algorithms. The results clearly highlight the remarkable performance of the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) in terms of convergence speed and exploration capability, surpassing other algorithms. Consequently, when compared to the most advanced metaheuristic algorithm, FWOA proves to be a strong competitor.

The slime mould algorithm (SMA) is a new swarm intelligence algorithm inspired by the oscillatory behavior of slime moulds during foraging. Numerous researchers have widely applied the SMA and its variants in various domains in the field and proved its value by conducting various literatures. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the SMA is introduced, which is based on 130 articles obtained from Google Scholar between 2022 and 2023. In this study, firstly, the SMA theory is described. Secondly, the improved SMA variants are provided and categorized according to the approach used to apply them. Finally, we also discuss the main applications domains of the SMA, such as engineering optimization, energy optimization, machine learning, network, scheduling optimization, and image segmentation. This review presents some research suggestions for researchers interested in this algorithm, such as conducting additional research on multi-objective and discrete SMAs and extending this to neural networks and extreme learning machining.

Slime Mould Algorithm (SMA) is a new swarm intelligence algorithm inspired by the oscillatory behavior of slime molds during foraging. Numerous researchers have widely applied SMA and its variants in various domains and proved its value by the experiments in literatures. In this paper a comprehensive survey on SMA is introduced, which is based on 130 articles visa Google-scholar between 2022 and July, 2023. Firstly, the theory of SMA is described. Secondly the improved SMA variants are provided and categorized according to the approach that they are applied with. Finally, it also discusses the main applications domains of SMA such as engineering optimization, energy optimization, machine learning, network, scheduling optimization, image segmentation and etc. This review presents some research suggestion for researcher who is interested in this algorithm.

In this paper, a new hybrid Manta Ray Foraging Optimization (MRFO) with Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm (AMRFOCS) is proposed. Firstly, quantum bit Bloch spherical coordinate coding is used for the initialization of the population, which improves the diversity of the expansion of the traversal ability of the search space. Secondly, the dynamic disturbance factor is introduced to balance the exploratory and exploitative search ability of the algorithm. Finally, the unique nesting strategy of the cuckoo and Levy flight is introduced to enhance the search ability. AMRFOCS is tested on CEC2017 and CEC2020 benchmark functions, which is also compared and tested by using different dimensions and other state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms. Experimental results reveal that the AMRFOCS algorithm has a superior convergence rate and optimization precision. At the same time, the nonparametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test and Friedman test show that the AMRFOCS has good stability and superiority. In addition, the proposed AMRFOCS is applied to the three-dimensional WSN coverage problem. Compared with the other four 3D deployment methods optimized by metaheuristic algorithms, the AMRFOCS effectively reduces the redundancy of sensor nodes, possesses a faster convergence speed and higher coverage and then provides a more effective and practical deployment scheme.