An Augmented Slime Mold Algorithm Based on Spiral Sensing Search Mechanism and Its Engineering Application for Photovoltaic Cell Parameter Identification Problem

The slime mold algorithm (SMA) is a metaheuristic optimization algorithm that simulates the foraging behavior of slime molds. Compared to other optimization algorithms, SMA has fewer parameters, faster convergence speed, and stronger optimization capabilities. However, the standard SMA uses two randomly selected individuals to guide the search direction of the population, which results in excessive randomness during the search process. This can lead to the loss of valuable information and waste computational resources. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes an enhanced slime mold algorithm (S2SMA) based on a spiral sensing search mechanism. The main contributions of this study are as follows: Firstly, a fitness–distance balanced oscillation search mechanism is introduced to solve the issue of lack of guidance in the individual oscillatory search phase in the original SMA, thus enhancing the global exploration ability of the algorithm. Secondly, the spiral sensing search mechanism is introduced, reshaping the random redistribution behavior in SMA. This aims to fully utilize the effective information in the existing population, improve search efficiency, and enhance population diversity. Finally, the computational logic of SMA is restructured based on the existing parameters, improving the algorithm’s performance while avoiding additional computational overhead. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed S2SMA, experiments were conducted on 71 test instances from the IEEE CEC2017 and IEEE CEC2021 benchmark sets, as well as three engineering problems. The algorithm was compared with classical algorithms, high-performance algorithms, and advanced SMA variants. Experimental results show that S2SMA outperforms the classical algorithms, high-performance algorithms, and other SMA variants in terms of both performance and robustness, demonstrating its potential application in engineering optimization.