Development of an Enhanced Ant Lion Optimization Algorithm and its Application in Antenna Array Synthesis

In order to design a highly effective communication system, antenna plays a vital role and antenna array adds to the performances. And to achieve such a goal, the crucial challenge is to determine the optimum spacing between the elements and their excitations. In order to address this issue a novel optimization technique named as enhanced ant lion optimization (e-ALO) algorithm has been developed by modifying the basic Ant lion optimization algorithm. Further, to validate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm, few benchmark functions have been successfully tested and significant improvement is obtained in comparison to other reported optimization approaches. The proposed scheme is applied to antenna array synthesis problem to optimize the inter-element spacing and excitation of the elements for different antenna geometries, with an objective to minimize the sidelobe levels while keeping other constraints within boundary limits. The encouraging results obtained from the study have emphatically placed the proposed e-ALO algorithm in the optimization arena as a dominant player.