Dynamic Adaptive Ant Lion Optimizer applied to route planning for unmanned aerial vehicle

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel Dynamic Adaptive Ant Lion Optimizer (DAALO) for route planning of unmanned aerial vehicle. Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO) is a new intelligent algorithm motivated by the phenomenon that antlions hunt ants in nature, showing the great potential to solve the optimization problems of engineering. In the proposed DAALO, the random walk of ants is replaced by Levy flight to make ALO escape from local optima more easily. Besides, by introducing the improvement rate of population as the feedback, the size of trap is adjusted dynamically based on the 1/5 Principle to improve the performance of ALO including convergence accuracy, convergence speed and stability. Compared to some other bio-inspired methods, the proposed algorithm are utilized to find the optimal route in two different environments such as mountain model and city model. The comparison results demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness and feasibility of DAALO.