An Improved Flower Pollination Algorithm for Optimal Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Path Planning Problem

Path planning of Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV) is a rather complicated global optimum problem which is about seeking a superior sailing route considering the different kinds of constrains under complex combat field environment. Flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is a new optimization method motivated by flower pollination behavior. In this paper, a variant of FPA is proposed to solve the UUV path planning problem in two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) space. Optimization strategies of particle swarm optimization are applied to the local search process of IFPA to enhance its search ability. In the progress of iteration of this improved algorithm, a dimension by dimension based update and evaluation strategy on solutions is used. This new approach can accelerate the global convergence speed while preserving the strong robustness of standard FPA. The realization procedure for this improved flower pollination algorithm is also presented. To prove the performance of this proposed method, it is compared with nine population-based algorithms. The experiment result shows that the proposed approach is more effective and feasible in UUV path planning in 2D and 3D space.