An Optimization Method for Coil Design Problems Based on Physarum Solver and Evolutionary Computation

This paper presents a new optimization approach for coil design problems. In conventional evolutional approaches, disconnected conductor geometries are included in the search space, and this feature makes it difficult to find acceptable optimization results. Thus, in the present method, coil design problems are treated as optimum routing ones. In order to solve the routing problem, the physarum solver is used, and resultant routes obtained by the physarum solver are controlled on the basis of evolutionary computations. The present method is applied to the design problems of simple line coil and planar inductor. It is shown that the present method can effectively find coil designs with better performance in comparison with a conventional evolutional approach that does not have any technique to generate surely connect geometry. © 2025 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC.