Adaptive Operator Quantum-Behaved Pigeon-Inspired Optimization Algorithm with Application to UAV Path Planning

Path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in threatening and adversarial areas is a constrained nonlinear optimal problem which takes a great amount of static and dynamic constraints into account. Quantum-behaved pigeon-inspired optimization (QPIO) has been widely applied to such nonlinear problems. However, conventional QPIO is suffering low global convergence speed and local optimum. In order to solve the above problems, an improved QPIO algorithm, adaptive operator QPIO, is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a new initialization process based on logistic mapping method is introduced to generate the initial population of the pigeon-swarm. After that, to improve the performance of the map and compass operation, the factor parameter will be adaptively updated in each iteration, which can balance the ability between global and local search. In the final landmark operation, the gradual decreasing pigeon population-updating strategy is introduced to prevent premature convergence and local optimum. Finally, the demonstration of the proposed algorithm on UAV path planning problem is presented, and the comparison result indicates that the performance of our algorithm is better than that of particle swarm optimization (PSO), pigeon-inspired optimization (PIO), and its variants, in terms of convergence and accuracy.