Building a hybridised meta-heuristic optimisation algorithm for efficient cluster analysis

Nature-inspired algorithms are a relatively recent field of meta-heuristics introduced to optimise the process of clustering unlabelled data. In recent years, hybridisation of these algorithms has been pursued to combine the best of multiple algorithms for more efficient clustering and overcoming their drawbacks. In this paper, we discuss a novel hybridisation concept where we combine the exploration and exploitation processes of the vanilla bat and vanilla whale algorithm to develop a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm. We test this algorithm against the existing vanilla meta-heuristic algorithms, including the vanilla bat and whale algorithm. These tests are performed on several single objective CEC functions to compare convergence speed to the minima coordinates. Additional tests are performed on several real-life and artificial clustering datasets to compare convergence speeds and clustering quality. Finally, we test the hybrid on real-world cases with unlabelled clustering data, namely a credit card fraud detection dataset, and a COVID-19 diagnosis dataset, and end with a discussion on the significance of the work, its limitations and future scope. © 2023 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Research on logistics UAV task assignment based on improved ant colony algorithm

Logistics UAV delivery has been well developed in the fight against COVID-19 pneumonia, and attracts more and more scholars to research. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is one of the effective solutions to solve the UAV task assignment problem. The algorithm adopts the principle of positive feedback to speed up the evolution process. However, the algorithm has some defects, such as long search time, easy to fall into local optimum and so on. Aiming at the defects of ACO, we put forward two improvements in this paper: On the one hand, differential distribution of initial pheromone is proposed to avoid blind search in the initial stage and improve the convergence speed. On the other hand, we will reduce the number of candidate nodes in the dynamic strategy, and ants choose the next node in the dynamic candidate list to reduce the calculation of local exploitation. Simulation results show that the improved ACO can significantly improve the convergence speed and has a good effect on solving the task assignment problem of logistics UAV. © 2022 SPIE.