A Mahalanobis Surrogate-Assisted Ant Lion Optimization and Its Application in 3D Coverage of Wireless Sensor Networks

Metaheuristic algorithms are widely employed in modern engineering applications because they do not need to have the ability to study the objective function’s features. However, these algorithms may spend minutes to hours or even days to acquire one solution. This paper presents a novel efficient Mahalanobis sampling surrogate model assisting Ant Lion optimization algorithm to address this problem. For expensive calculation problems, the optimization effect goes even further by using MSAALO. This model includes three surrogate models: the global model, Mahalanobis sampling surrogate model, and local surrogate model. Mahalanobis distance can also exclude the interference correlations of variables. In the Mahalanobis distance sampling model, the distance between each ant and the others could be calculated. Additionally, the algorithm sorts the average length of all ants. Then, the algorithm selects some samples to train the model from these Mahalanobis distance samples. Seven benchmark functions with various characteristics are chosen to testify to the effectiveness of this algorithm. The validation results of seven benchmark functions demonstrate that the algorithm is more competitive than other algorithms. The simulation results based on different radii and nodes show that MSAALO improves the average coverage by 2.122% and 1.718%, respectively.