Atom search optimization (ASO) is a newly developed metaheuristic algorithm inspired by molecular basis dynamics. The paramount challenge in ASO is that it is prone to stagnation in local optima and premature convergence. To solve these issues, this paper uses a cellular automata structure, a Lévy flight and adaptive weight strategies to help ASO balance exploration and exploitation; the proposed method is named CALFASO. First, the cellular automata structure provides more information exchange for the population and enriches the diversity of the population. Second, a Lévy flight has the characteristics of a random walk, its short-step long-term search can improve the global search capability of the algorithm, and its short-term long-step mutations can help the algorithm jump out of local optima. Third, adaptive weights can effectively improve convergence performance. Finally, the proposed CALFASO was evaluated on the CEC2017 test set and real-world engineering problems and compared with classical and novel evolutionary algorithms to verify its performance. The experimental results and statistical analysis show that the performance of the proposed CALFASO algorithm is better than that of the other selected algorithms.

Soft sensing technology has been proved to be an effective tool for the online estimation of unmeasured or variables that are difficult to directly measure. The performance of a soft sensor depends heavily on its convergence speed and generalization ability to a great extent. Based on this idea, we propose a new soft sensor model, Isomap-SVR. First, the sample data set is divided into training set and testing set by using self-organizing map (SOM) neural network to ensure the fairness and symmetry of data segmentation. Isometric feature mapping (Isomap) method is used for dimensionality reduction of the model input data, which could not only reduce the structure complexity of the proposed model but speed up learning speed, and then the Support Vector Machine Regression (SVR) is applied to the regression model. A novel bat algorithm based on Cauchy mutation and Lévy flight strategy is used to optimize parameters of Isomap and SVR to improve the accuracy of the proposed model. Finally, the model is applied to the prediction of the temperature of rotary kiln calcination zone, which is difficult to measure directly. The simulation results show that the proposed soft sensor modeling method has higher learning speed and better generalization ability. Compared with other algorithms, this algorithm has obvious advantages and is an effective modeling method.