in view of the low search performance of the salp swarm algorithm,the explorer variation salp swarm algorithm is proposed,which divides the population into three parts:leader,followers and explorers.By improving the update strategy of followers and introduc-ing the explorer variation mechanism,the search performance of the algorithm is improved.Numerical experiments show that the search speed and accuracy of this algorithm are signif-icantly higher than the basic algorithm and the algorithm in the literature.The algorithm is applied to the pressure vessel design problem for parameter optimization,and the optimal cost is significantly improved.