An Enhanced Red-Billed Blue Magpie Optimizer Based on Superior Data Driven for Numerical Optimization Problems

The Red-Billed Blue Magpie Optimizer (RBMO) is a recently introduced swarm-based meta-heuristic that has shown strong potential in engineering optimization but remains under-explored. To address its inherent limitations, this paper proposes an Enhanced RBMO (ERBMO) that synergistically incorporates two key strategies: a dominant-group-based two-stage covariance-driven strategy that captures evolutionary trends to improve population quality while reinforcing global exploration, and a Powell mechanism (PM) that eliminates dimensional stagnation and markedly strengthens convergence. Extensive experiments on the CEC 2017 benchmark suite demonstrate that ERBMO outperforms ten basic and improved algorithms in global exploration, local convergence accuracy and robustness, attaining Friedman ranks of 1.931, 1.621, 1.345 and 1.276 at 10D, 30D, 50D and 100D, respectively. Furthermore, empirical studies on practical engineering design problems confirm the algorithm’s capability to consistently deliver high-quality solutions, highlighting its broad applicability to real-world constrained optimization tasks. In future work, we will deploy the algorithm for real-world tasks such as UAV path-planning and resource-scheduling problems.