Pattern Synthesis of Planar Nonuniform Circular Antenna Arrays Using a Chaotic Adaptive Invasive Weed Optimization Algorithm

A novel invasive weed optimization (IWO) variant called chaotic adaptive invasive weed optimization (CAIWO) is proposed and applied for the optimization of nonuniform circular antenna arrays. A chaotic search method has been combined into the modified IWO with adaptive dispersion, where the seeds produced by a weed are dispersed in the search space with standard deviation specified by the fitness value of the weed. To evaluate the performance of CAIWO, several representative benchmark functions are minimized using various optimization algorithms. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach improves the performance of the algorithm significantly, in terms of both the convergence speed and exploration ability. Moreover, the scheme of CAIWO is employed to find out an optimal set of weights and antenna element separation to obtain a radiation pattern with maximum side-lobe level (SLL) reduction with different numbers of antenna element under two cases with different purposes. The design results obtained by CAIWO have comfortably outperformed the published results obtained by other state-of-the-art metaheuristics in a statistically meaningful way.