Artificial electric field algorithm with inertia and repulsion for spherical minimum spanning tree

Artificial electric field algorithm (AEFA) is a potential global optimization algorithm proposed in recent years and has been successfully applied to various engineering optimizations. However, precocious convergence tends to occur when solving complex engineering optimization problems. To avoid premature convergence to some extent, an artificial electric field algorithm with inertia and repulsion (IRAEFA) is proposed. The IRAEFA algorithm introduces the inertia mechanism and the repulsion between charges, expands the search space, increases the diversity of population, balances the exploration and development ability of the algorithm, and avoids the algorithm falling into the local optimal solution. Finally, the IRAEFA algorithm is used to solve the spherical mining spanning tree (MST) problem, and the results obtained are compared and analyzed with the results of other well-known metaheuristics optimization algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance than other algorithms in solving spherical MST problems.