Student Psychology-Based Optimization Algorithm Based on Educational Learning Is Used for Numerical Optimization and Practical Application

As a meta-heuristic inspired by human student learning behaviors, the original Student Psychology-Based Optimization (SPBO) suffers from insufficient exploitation of historical population records, simplistic individual interaction patterns and high risk of falling into local optima. This work develops an enhanced SPBO (ESPBO) embedding three dedicated learning mechanisms. The adaptive knowledge-accumulation learning component imports personal historical best, global elite and population-mean information into position update formulas to sustain coherent search trajectories and enhance convergence precision. The multi-level peer collaborative learning module categorizes agents into excellent, intermediate and under-performing groups based on fitness values. Customized learning rules are configured for each group to enable diverse information sharing: elite individuals expand promising search regions, medium-level agents learn from counterparts, and inferior individuals move toward high-quality candidates. The progressive examination feedback component dynamically modulates search intensity by measuring the fitness improvement of each individual, so as to better balance global exploration and local exploitation. Comparative numerical experiments are carried out on CEC2017 and CEC2022 benchmark test suites against multiple advanced meta-heuristic algorithms. Results indicate that ESPBO exhibits outstanding accuracy and robustness on unimodal, multimodal, hybrid and composite test functions. To explore its real-world applicability, ESPBO is adopted for mobile-robot path-planning simulations under multi-scale grid maps. Simulation results from 20 × 20, 40 × 40 and 60 × 60 environments illustrate that ESPBO stably produces collision-free trajectories, outperforming comparative algorithms in path length, smoothness and safety performance. It is demonstrated that the three embedded learning mechanisms substantially strengthen the optimization capacity of vanilla SPBO, and ESPBO possesses considerable application potential for numerical optimization as well as mobile robot path-planning scenarios.