Abstract
The immune plasma algorithm (IP algorithm or IPA) is one of the most recent meta-heuristic techniques and models the fundamental steps of immune or convalescent plasma treatment, attracting researchers' attention once more with the COVID-19 pandemic. The IP algorithm determines the number of donors and the number of receivers when two specific control parameters are initialized and protects their values until the end of termination. However, determining which values are appropriate for the control parameters by adjusting the number of donors and receivers and guessing how they interact with each other are difficult tasks. In this study, we attempted to determine the number of plasma donors and receivers with an improved mechanism that depended on dividing the whole population into two sub-populations using a statistical measure known as the percentile and then a novel variant of the IPA called the percentile IPA (pIPA) was introduced. To investigate the performance of the pIPA, 22 numerical benchmark problems were solved by assigning different values to the control parameters of the algorithm. Moreover, two complex engineering problems, one of which required the filtering of noise from the recorded signal and the other the path planning of an unmanned aerial vehicle, were solved by the pIPA. Experimental studies showed that the percentile-based donor-receiver selection mechanism significantly contributed to the solving capabilities of the pIPA and helped it outperform well-known and state-of-art meta-heuristic algorithms.