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This paper addresses optimization problems subject to an objective function's evaluation‐number constraint arbitrarily given in advance. These problems are practical for black‐box objective functions which cost much money and/or time per evaluation because money and/or time constraints are typically applicable in real‐world projects. This paper suggests a new solution strategy that can be used to adapt metaheuristics to evaluation‐number constraints arbitrarily given in advance. The proposed strategy updates the setting parameters of a target metaheuristic algorithm for every generation by solving a fixed small‐size optimization problem related to the evaluation‐number constraint. It has the advantage of being insensitive to the effects of dimensionality increases in principle. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is confirmed by numerical experiments with two well‐known metaheuristics, i.e., the particle swarm optimization algorithm and the differential evolution algorithm. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) path planning can be treated as a nondeterministic polynomial (NP) hard concern or an optimization problem. The conventional approaches are unable to effectively handle these issues due to discontinuity, non‐linearity, multi‐modality, and inseparability. On the other hand, meta‐heuristic algorithms are effective at tackling these issues because they are simple, adaptable, and derivation free. To enhance the performance in a variety of challenging circumstances, this paper proposes a novel Q‐learning‐based multi‐objective sheep flock optimizer with a Cauchy operator (Q‐MOSFO‐CA) to solve the constrained UAV path planning issues. The multi‐objective functions considered here are costs and constraints (threat, terrain, turning, climbing, and gliding constraints) to determine the feasible and optimal path. To avoid the probability of falling into the local optimum and to address the shortcoming of unbalanced convergence and also to maintain the exploitation and exploration capability, the Cauchy operator (CA) is integrated with the sheep flock optimization (SFO) algorithm. The Q‐learning model is introduced to balance both the global and local searches. Here, the exploration model performs the global search whereas the exploitation model performs the local search to attain an optimal solution. In the simulation scenario, the statistical analysis is conducted under two scenarios, and some essential measures such as the number of iterations at convergence (NIC), evaluation time (ET), energy consumption, and convergence analysis are determined. The proposed method obtains NIC of 1305 and 1436, ET of 12.8 and 15.2 s, and energy consumption of 20,600 and 21,465 J for both Scenarios 1 and 2, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]