A competitive particle swarm optimizer and its application to wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, a simple competitive particle swarm optimizer for finding plural acceptable solutions is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, particles are divided into plural groups corresponding to the required number of solutions. The groups simultaneously search for solutions in their own priority search regions. These regions prevent the different groups from searching for the same solutions. The proposed algorithm can effectively find desired plural acceptable solutions without introducing complex judgments for convergences to each solution and without increasing the number of search iterations. Also, the proposed algorithm can easily control distances between these solutions by adjusting a single additional parameter. Through numerical experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified. In addition, the proposed algorithm is applied to a problem in wireless sensor networks. It is shown that obtained results can contribute to prolonging lifetime of such networks. © 2012 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.