A Multi-Strategy Enhanced Crested Porcupine Optimizer with Targeted Defense Mechanism Improvement for Global Optimization

Metaheuristic algorithms are widely used to solve complex optimization problems, but the trade-off between exploration and exploitation often limits their performance. The Crested Porcupine Optimizer (CPO) employs four bio-inspired defense mechanisms and achieves competitive performance, but it still tends to converge prematurely, initialize populations poorly, and rely on static parameters that cannot adapt to different phases. This paper proposes a Multi-Strategy Enhanced Crested Porcupine Optimizer (MSCPO) with four phase-targeted enhancement strategies: (1) Kent Chaos Opposition-Based Learning Initialization (KCOL) improves the initial population distribution through chaotic-weighted reflection; (2) Arctic Puffin Optimization (APO)-Inspired Dual-Modal Evasion (APO-DME) reduces dependence on the global best solution and increases population diversity through dual-mode differential perturbation; (3) Adaptive Dual-Differential Perturbation (ADDP) refines the search by combining population diversity and elite guidance information; (4) Periodic Dynamic Adaptive Perturbation (PDAP) enhances exploitation through periodic trigonometric perturbation and a fitness-conditioned update rule. These strategies interact across the optimization process to strengthen each defense mechanism at the appropriate phase. On the CEC 2017 and CEC 2022 benchmark suites, MSCPO achieves the best overall mean rank among all compared algorithms, with an overall rank of 2.638 on CEC 2017 and 2.375 on CEC 2022. A full-factorial ablation over all 16 strategy combinations confirms that each strategy contributes positively: removing any single strategy degrades the overall mean rank, and the complete MSCPO achieves the best mean rank (3.34), significantly outperforming all single-strategy variants (Wilcoxon signed-rank test, p < 0.001). To verify the practical applicability of MSCPO, the algorithm is further applied to three engineering design problems: step-cone pulley design, hydrostatic thrust bearing design, and robotic gripper design. MSCPO ranks first on the hydrostatic thrust bearing problem, second on the step-cone pulley problem, and third on the robotic gripper problem. Future work will explore adaptive population sizing to further improve the scalability of MSCPO on very high-dimensional problems.