Optimal Path Planning in Environments with Static Obstacles by Harmony Search Algorithm

Path planning represents an important optimization problem that need to be solved in various applications. It is a hard optimization problem thus deterministic algorithms are not usable but it can be tackled by stochastic population based metaheuristics such as swarm intelligence algorithms. In this paper we adopted and adjusted harmony search algorithm for the path planning problem in environment with static obstacles and danger zones. Objective function includes path length and safety degree. The proposed method was tested on standard benchmark examples from literature. Simulation results show that our proposed model produces better and more consistent results in spite of its simplicity.