Feeding the fish - Weight update strategies for the fish school search algorithm

Abstract

Choosing optimal parameter settings and update strategies is a key issue for almost all population based optimization algorithms based on swarm intelligence. For state-of-the-art optimization algorithms the optimal parameter settings and update strategies for different problem sizes are well known. In this paper we investigate and compare different newly developed weight update strategies for the recently developed Fish School Search (FSS) algorithm. For this algorithm the optimal update strategies have not been investigated so far. We introduce a new dilation multiplier as well as different weight update steps where fish in poor regions loose weight more quickly than fish in regions with a lot of food. Moreover, we show how a simple non-linear decrease of the individual and volitive step parameters is able to significantly speed up the convergence of FSS. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.