Recently, Professors Wang Yanfeng and Zhang Huanlong from the College of Electrical and Information Engineering at Zhengzhou University of Light Industry (ZZULI) published a research article entitled "Application of Improved Crown Porcupine Optimizer in UAV Path Planning Based on Dynamic Weighted JAYA-CPO Attack Strategy" in Protection and Control of Modern Power Systems, a prestigious journal in the field of engineering technology.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become an essential tool for powerline inspections, particularly in remote or complex areas where they can supersede traditional manual inspections efficiently and safely. Nevertheless, owing to the obstacles around power transmission lines, such as power transmission towers and trees, precise path planning is indispensable for UAVs to smoothly complete their tasks. Traditional path planning algorithms often struggle to adapt to dynamic environments and multi-objective inspection requirements. To address this issue, this article puts forward a path planning algorithm that combines the Cauchy inverse cumulative distribution with an improved crown porcupine optimizer (ICPO). Firstly, a chaos theory-based initialization method is employed to achieve a more uniform distribution of the initial population in the search space, thus enhancing the quality of initial solutions; secondly, the Cauchy inverse cumulative distribution strategy is introduced and a weighted JAYA-CPO attack strategy is proposed to balance global exploration with local exploitation, ensuring that the algorithm attains the global optimum. Furthermore, the ICPO algorithm is applied to UAV path planning for powerline inspections. Through incorporating optimality, safety, and feasibility constraints into multiple complex terrain models, its effectiveness is validated.

In this paper, ZZULI is credited as the first affiliated institution, with Zhang Huanlong serving as the first author, master's degree candidate Guo Chenglin as the second author, and Wang Yanfeng as the corresponding author. This research was supported by programs such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Key Research and Development Special Projects of Henan Province, and the Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of Henan Province.

Protection and Control of Modern Power Systems is dedicated to publishing advanced perspectives, technologies, methods, and applications related to the protection and control of modern power systems. It is categorized as a Chinese Academy of Sciences Q1 TOP journal, with a 2024 impact factor of 11.9.

Journal article link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11220939

Citation Format: H. Zhang et al., "Application of Improved Crown Porcupine Optimizer in UAV Path Planning Based on Dynamic Weighted JAYA-CPO Attack Strategy," in Protection and Control of Modern Power Systems, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 101-127, November 2025, doi: 10.23919/PCMP.2024.000413.