The Educational Competition Optimizer (ECO) formulates search as a three-stage didactic process—primary, secondary and tertiary learning—but the original framework suffers from scarce information exchange, sluggish late-stage convergence and an unstable exploration–exploitation ratio. We present EECO, which introduces three synergistic mechanisms: a regenerative population strategy that uses the covariance matrix of elite solutions to maintain diversity, a Powell mechanism that accelerates exploitation within promising regions, and a trend-driven update that adaptively balances exploration and exploitation. EECO was evaluated on the 29 benchmark functions of CEC-2017 and nine real-world constrained engineering problems. Results show that EECO delivers higher solution accuracy and markedly smaller standard deviations than eight recent algorithms, including EDECO, ISGTOA, APSM-jSO, LSHADE-SPACMA, EOSMA, GLSRIME, EPSCA, and ESLPSO. Across the entire experimental battery, EECO consistently occupied the first place in the Friedman hierarchy: it attained average ranks of 2.138 in 10-D, 1.438 in 30-D, 1.207 in 50-D, and 1.345 in 100-D CEC-2017 benchmarks, together with 1.722 on the nine real-world engineering problems, corroborating its superior and dimension-scalable performance. The Wilcoxon rank sum test confirms the statistical significance of these improvements. With its remarkable convergence accuracy and reliable stability, EECO emerges as a promising variant of the ECO algorithm.

The arithmetic optimization algorithm (AOA) is a recently proposed swarm intelligence optimizer with a simple structure and few control parameters. However, the original AOA relies on a single update mechanism, which often leads to premature convergence and limited adaptability in complex optimization problems. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a multi-strategy improved arithmetic optimization algorithm (IAOA). The proposed algorithm constructs a heterogeneous strategy pool composed of six search strategies, including arithmetic update, differential evolution operators, competitive elite learning, interpolation-based acceleration, and curriculum education learning. Furthermore, an adaptive strategy regulation mechanism based on fitness improvement contribution is introduced to dynamically adjust the selection probability of each strategy. Extensive experiments conducted on the CEC2017 and CEC2022 benchmark suites demonstrate that IAOA achieves a superior optimization accuracy, convergence speed, and stability compared with several classical algorithms, recent metaheuristics, and AOA variants. Statistical tests including the Wilcoxon rank-sum test and Friedman mean rank test confirm the significance of the performance improvements. In addition, the algorithm is successfully applied to a three-dimensional path planning problem for amphibious unmanned aerial vehicles, demonstrating its effectiveness in solving complex engineering optimization problems.

To address the limitations of the original Preschool Education Optimization Algorithm (PEOA) in population diversity preservation and late-stage convergence accuracy, this paper proposes a Multi-strategy Enhanced Preschool Education Optimization Algorithm (MEPEOA). The proposed algorithm integrates an improved population initialization strategy, a multi-strategy collaborative search mechanism, adaptive regulation, and boundary control to achieve a more effective balance between global exploration and local exploitation. The performance of MEPEOA is comprehensively evaluated on IEEE CEC2017 and CEC2022 benchmark suites and compared with several state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms, including EWOA, MPSO, L_SHADE, BKA, ALA, BPBO, and the original PEOA. Experimental results demonstrate that MEPEOA achieves superior optimization accuracy and stability on the majority of benchmark functions. For example, on CEC2017 with 30 dimensions, MEPEOA reduces the average fitness value of multimodal function F9 by approximately 73.6% compared with PEOA and by more than 47% compared with EWOA. In terms of stability, the standard deviation of MEPEOA on function F6 is only 4.13 × 10⁻³, which is several orders of magnitude lower than those of EWOA, MPSO, and BKA, indicating highly consistent convergence behavior. Furthermore, MEPEOA exhibits clear advantages in convergence speed and robustness, achieving the best Friedman mean rank across all tested benchmark suites. In addition, MEPEOA is applied to a two-dimensional grid-based path planning problem, where it consistently generates shorter and more stable collision-free paths than competing algorithms. Overall, the proposed MEPEOA demonstrates strong robustness, fast convergence, and superior stability, making it an effective and extensible solution for complex numerical optimization and practical engineering problems.

The Secretary Bird Optimization Algorithm (SBOA) is a novel swarm-based meta-heuristic that formulates an optimization model by mimicking the secretary bird’s hunting and predator-evasion behaviors, and thus possesses appreciable application potential. Nevertheless, it suffers from an unbalanced exploration–exploitation ratio, difficulty in maintaining population diversity, and a tendency to be trapped in local optima. To eliminate these drawbacks, this paper proposes an SBOA variant (MESBOA) that integrates a multi-population management strategy with an experience-trend guidance strategy. The proposed method is compared with eight advanced basic/enhanced algorithms of different categories on both the CEC2017 and CEC2022 test suites. Experimental results demonstrate that MESBOA delivers faster convergence, more stable robustness and higher accuracy, achieving mean rankings of 2.500 (CEC2022 10-D), 2.333 (CEC2022 20-D), 1.828 (CEC2017 50-D) and 1.931 (CEC2017 100-D). Moreover, engineering constrained optimization problems further verify its applicability to real-world optimization tasks.

Wireless sensor network (WSN) coverage optimization is a critical factor in improving network service quality, yet it faces challenges such as deployment uniformity, high-dimensional optimization, and the balance between exploration and exploitation under limited node resources. To address the shortcomings of the cultural historical optimization algorithm (CHOA), including insufficient global exploration, lack of dynamic regulation, and limited local exploitation accuracy, this paper proposes a film and television strategy-based multi-strategy cultural historical optimization algorithm (FTSCHOA). The proposed algorithm enhances performance through three synergistic mechanisms: a DE-style evolutionary operator that strengthens global exploration and population diversity; a film-and-television strategy that balances exploration and exploitation via random perturbations and adaptive parameter regulation; and a memory-based neighborhood local search that performs refined exploitation around high-quality solution sets to improve local optimization accuracy. Extensive experiments conducted on the CEC2017 and CEC2022 benchmark suites with dimensions of 10, 20, 30, and 50 demonstrate that FTSCHOA outperforms comparative algorithms in terms of optimization accuracy, convergence speed, and stability. The Friedman mean rank test indicates that FTSCHOA consistently achieves the best average ranking, while the Wilcoxon rank-sum test confirms that its performance differences with respect to competing algorithms are statistically significant ($p<0.05$). When applied to WSN coverage optimization in a $100\hspace{0.17em}\mathrm{m}\times 100\hspace{0.17em}\mathrm{m}$ monitoring region, FTSCHOA achieves coverage rates of 0.9351 and 0.9738 with 25 and 30 sensor nodes, respectively, which are significantly higher than those obtained by PSO, GWO, CHOA, and other algorithms. Moreover, the resulting node deployments exhibit greater uniformity, fewer coverage holes, and lower redundancy. The experimental results demonstrate that FTSCHOA effectively overcomes the limitations of traditional algorithms and provides an efficient and practical solution for WSN node deployment optimization, with strong potential for application in real-world scenarios such as environmental monitoring and smart agriculture.