Improvement strategies for multi-swarm PSO in dynamic environments

Abstract

Many real world optimization problems are dynamic, meaning that their optimal solutions are time-varying. In recent years, an effective approach to address these problems has been the multi-swarmPSO (mPSO). Despite this, we believe that there is still room for improvement and, in this contribution we propose two simple strategies to increase the effectiveness of mPSO. The first one faces the diversity loss in the swarm after an environment change; while the second one increases the efficiency through stopping swarms showing a bad behavior. From the experiments performed on the Moving Peaks Benchmark, we have confirmed the benefits of our strategies. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.