Hybrid Cat-Artificial Fish Swarm Based Node Deployment Optimization in Intelligent Transportation IoT

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT)-based highway bridge structural health monitoring (HBSHM) and intelligent transportation systems (ITS) plays an essential role in detecting damage for large and complex bridge structures. The HBSHM provides ITS with bridge health condition information for real-time traffic management. The ITS provides HBSHM with the required traffic data to improve the HBSHM system’s accuracy and reliability. Node deployment optimization (NDO) is critical in HBSHM as sensor node deployment directly affects the quality of collected data. To better solve the NDO problem in HBSHM, a novel hybrid cat-artificial fish swarm algorithm (CAT-AFSA) based on the Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm (AFSA) and Cat Swarm optimization (CSO) is proposed in this paper. The algorithm introduces seeking and tracing behaviors of CSO into AFSA, which effectively expands the search space of artificial fish and reduces the blind search of it. The performance of the CAT-AFSA is first tested using four benchmark functions, and then its validity and feasibility for the NDO are verified using an engineering example. The simulations demonstrate that the CAT-AFSA has better search performance and computational efficiency compared with the AFSA and CSO. The CAT-AFSA has a broad application prospect in the field of NDO in civil engineering.