To address the problems of the traditional Supply–Demand Optimization (SDO) algorithm in wireless sensor network (WSN) node deployment—such as blind search direction, weak global exploration capability, coarse boundary handling, and insufficient maintenance of population diversity—this paper proposes a Multi-Strategy Enhanced Supply–Demand Optimization algorithm (MESDO). The proposed MESDO is validated on the CEC2017 and CEC2022 benchmark test suites. The results demonstrate that MESDO achieves superior performance in unimodal, multimodal, hybrid, and composite function optimization: for unimodal functions, it enhances local exploitation precision via elite-guided search to quickly converge to optimal regions; for multimodal functions, the adaptive differential evolution operator effectively avoids local optima by expanding exploration scope; for hybrid and composite functions, the centroid-based opposition learning boundary control maintains stable population diversity, ensuring adaptability to complex solution spaces. These advantages enable MESDO to effectively avoid premature convergence. According to the Friedman test, MESDO ranks first on CEC2017 (d = 30), CEC2022 (d = 10), and CEC2022 (d = 20), with average rankings of 1.20, 1.67, and 1.33, respectively—significantly outperforming the second-ranked SDO (average rankings of 3.60, 3.25, and 3.83). Finally, MESDO is applied to WSN deployment optimization. Its average coverage rate (86.80%) exceeds that of SDO (84.41%) by 2.39 percentage points, while its minimum coverage (84.80%) is 21.21 percentage points higher than that of AOO (69.96%). Moreover, its standard deviation (8.1308 × 10⁻³) is the lowest among all compared algorithms. The convergence curve reveals that MESDO achieves 82% coverage within 50 iterations, which is significantly faster than SDO (80 iterations) and IWOA (100 iterations). The node deployment distribution further shows that the generated nodes are uniformly distributed without coverage blind spots. In summary, MESDO demonstrates superior optimization accuracy, convergence speed, and stability in both function optimization and WSN deployment, providing a reliable and efficient approach for WSN deployment optimization.

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.

To address the tendency of the traditional Children’s Drawing Development Optimization (CDDO) algorithm to fall into local optima and converge slowly in global optimization and fire-field robot path planning, this study proposes a Multi-Strategy Enhanced Children’s Drawing Development Optimization (MECDDO) algorithm. The algorithm achieves performance improvements through three core strategies: (1) an adaptive cooperative search strategy that integrates information from the global best, worst, and random individuals and guides updates via dynamic weighting, expanding the exploration of the solution space; (2) a multi-strategy adaptive selection mechanism that constructs a pool of four differentiated strategies and dynamically adjusts selection probabilities based on strategy success rates, balancing exploration and exploitation; and (3) a global-optimum guided boundary repair strategy that reduces the loss of high-quality information from out-of-bounds solutions, enhancing local exploitation efficiency. Experiments on the CEC2017 benchmark suite demonstrate that MECDDO achieves outstanding performance across 30-, 50-, and 100-dimensional spaces. Statistical significance was evaluated using the Friedman test and Wilcoxon signed-rank test at a 0.05 significance level. The Friedman test mean rankings (M.R.) are 1.63, 2.20, and 2.70, respectively, consistently outperforming traditional CDDO (M.R. = 9.83, 9.93, 9.73, ranked 10th). Applied to mobile robot path planning, MECDDO achieves an average path length of 27.95483 in 20 × 20 grid environments (rank 1), shortening paths by 8.83% compared with CDDO (30.66212, rank 10), and 61.15516 in 40 × 40 grids (rank 1), reducing paths by 37.19% versus CDDO (97.20336, rank 9), providing trajectories free of redundant turns and convergence speeds 2–3 times faster than competing algorithms. These results validate MECDDO’s significant advantages in numerical optimization accuracy and practical robot path planning.