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• The path planning and path smoothing are combined through the high-order continuous Bezier curve. • An improved QPSO that incorporates two search mechanisms from bald eagle search (BES) is proposed. • The concept of semi-randomization is infused in some of our modifications in BES-MQPSO. • Enhanced intensive exploitation is performed by incorporating BES search and swoop mechanisms. • It may be the first time to apply BES tricks to help to enhance QPSO and into the path planning field. The design of path planning algorithms to obtain a smooth path that satisfies constraints such as obstacle avoidance, minimized cost, and dynamic feasibility for mobile robots in the workspace is a hot issue in the field of intelligent robotics. The metaheuristic optimization algorithm, which aims to solve path planning problems, is more efficient compared to traditional algorithms. In the current metaheuristic approaches, avoiding local minimum traps is the core goal of the scheme. In this paper, with the benefit of a high-order continuous Bezier curve, we construct an optimization problem of smooth path planning based on the length and the requirement of collision-free safety as constraints of the robot's expected path. Then, the smooth path planning problem is transformed into an optimization problem that searches the locations of control nodes of the Bezier curve. We solve the constructed path planning problem with our modified quantum particle swarm optimization algorithm (QPSO). Specifically, to overcome the shortcomings of the current PSO and QPSO-based particle swarm algorithms like prematurity, unbalanced global search, local exploitation, and local minima, we implement an improved QPSO algorithm denoted as BES-MQPSO that incorporates the search and swoop mechanisms from bald eagle search (BES) strategies. The method consists of four improved modifications: an improved local attractor, improved feature length, BES-enhanced intensive exploitation Strategy, and random variation mechanism. Our proposed BES-MQPSO with these four modifications is tested with benchmark functions and then applied to the smooth path planning problem. Finally, the superiority of BES-MQPSO is confirmed, and the ideal smooth path of the mobile robot is successfully planned. The planned path length is reduced by 4.45% and 2.82% compared to e-QPSO and SDEQPSO respectively, while the standard deviation is reduced by 67.46% and 69.82%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We integrate a PSO with a NN and ERNN to form PSO-NN and PSO-ERNN metaheuristic models. • The PSO trains the NN and ERNN to achieve faster convergence and avoid local minima. • The PSO-NN and PSO-ERNN models are evaluated using ten benchmark classification datasets. • The accuracy and computational efficiency of the models are improved. • The PSO-ERNN model outperforms the PSO-NN model for most of the tested datasets. There are several types of neural networks (NNs) that are widely used for data classification tasks. The supervised learning NN is an advanced network with a training algorithm for setting the weights and biases of the network in its training phase. However, traditional training algorithms such as backpropagation have some drawbacks, such as slow convergence speed and falling into local minima, which reduces the performance of the classifier. Therefore, different nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms are integrated with the NN training algorithms to provide derivative-free solutions for complex classification problems. Consequently, this paper proposes the integration of a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm with an improved Elman recurrent neural network (ERNN) to form a PSO-ERNN metaheuristic model. The key contribution of this study is the development of a new dimensional equation for ERNN architecture and the integration of PSO in ERNN learning to produce the PSO-ERNN model. The PSO is constructed to train the NN and ERNN models to achieve a fast convergence rate and avoid local minima problems. The PSO-ERNN model is validated by comparing it against the standard PSO-NN metaheuristic model and similar models from the literature. The PSO-NN and PSO-ERNN models are tested and evaluated using ten benchmark classification problems of breast cancer, heart, hepatitis, liver, wine, iris, lung cancer, yeast, Pima Indians diabetes, and ionosphere datasets. In the training phase, the results show that the PSO-ERNN model performs better than the PSO-NN model when the training set has a bigger size of samples. In the testing phase, the PSO-ERNN model outperforms the PSO-NN model for all the tested datasets except the lung cancer and yeast datasets, in which the accuracy percentage slightly decreases. In the validation phase, the PSO-ERNN model shows better performance quality in terms of accuracy percentage in six of the tested datasets. The average percentage of the training, testing, and validation accumulation show that the PSO-NN performs better than the PSO-ERNN in the lung cancer (87.27, 83.32), and heart (73.56, 70.64) datasets. On the other hand, the PSO-ERNN performs better than the PSO-NN in the iris (88.18, 86.74), hepatitis (88.60, 87.93), wine (89.16, 86.08), liver (73.56, 70.64), ionosphere (83.98, 78.94), and breast cancer (94.84, 91.17). PSO-NN and PSO-ERNN produce the same average results in the Pima Indians diabetes (84.00, 84.00) and yeast (91.31, 91.30) dataset. These results show clearly that the PSO-ERNN generally outperforms the PSO-NN when considering the overall results of the ten datasets. Nevertheless, the combinations of the PSO-NN and PSO-ERNN are proven to represent consistent and robust classification methods. The computational efficiencies of the training processes in both the PSO-NN and PSO-ERNN models are highly improved when coupled with the PSO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in metaheuristics have shown the advantages of using the Lévy distribution, which models a kind of random walk (named "Lévy flight") with occasional "big" steps. This characteristic makes Lévy flight especially useful for performing large "jumps" that allow the search to escape from a local optimum and restart in a different region of the search space. In this paper, we investigate this idea by applying Lévy flight to Jaya, a simple yet effective Swarm Intelligence optimization algorithm recently proposed in the literature. We perform experiments on the CEC 2014 benchmark as well as five industrial optimization problems taken from the CEC 2011 benchmark, and compare the performance of the proposed Lévy flight Jaya Algorithm (LJA) against several state-of-the-art algorithms for continuous optimization. Our numerical results show that, although both Jaya and LJA are in general less efficient than the most advanced algorithms on the CEC 2014 benchmark, LJA largely outperforms the original Jaya algorithm in most cases, and is also highly competitive on the tested industrial problems. • We present the Lévy flight Jaya Algorithm (LJA) for continuous optimization. • We evaluate the effect of the β parameter on LJA. • LJA consistently outperforms the original Jaya on most optimization problems. • We compare LJA with state-of-the-art algorithms on benchmark/industrial problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]