# Drone Squadron Optimization: a Self-adaptive Algorithm for Global Numerical Optimization

## TL;DR

Drone Squadron Optimization (DSO) is a novel self-adaptive metaheuristic inspired by artifact behavior, utilizing autonomous drones and a command center to dynamically explore and optimize complex functions, showing promising competitive results.

## Contribution

This paper introduces DSO, a flexible, artifact-inspired self-adaptive algorithm that evolves its movement scheme online for global numerical optimization.

## Key findings

- DSO performs competitively on benchmark functions.
- The self-adaptive perturbation scheme improves search flexibility.
- Results indicate promising optimization performance.

## Abstract

This paper proposes Drone Squadron Optimization, a new self-adaptive metaheuristic for global numerical optimization which is updated online by a hyper-heuristic. DSO is an artifact-inspired technique, as opposed to many algorithms used nowadays, which are nature-inspired. DSO is very flexible because it is not related to behaviors or natural phenomena. DSO has two core parts: the semi-autonomous drones that fly over a landscape to explore, and the Command Center that processes the retrieved data and updates the drones' firmware whenever necessary. The self-adaptive aspect of DSO in this work is the perturbation/movement scheme, which is the procedure used to generate target coordinates. This procedure is evolved by the Command Center during the global optimization process in order to adapt DSO to the search landscape. DSO was evaluated on a set of widely employed benchmark functions. The statistical analysis of the results shows that the proposed method is competitive with the other methods in the comparison, the performance is promising, but several future improvements are planned.