Quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization algorithm with controlled diversity

Abstract

Premature convergence, the major problem that confronts evolutionary algorithms, is also encountered with the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. In the previous work [11], [12], [13], the Quantum-behaved Particle Swarm (QPSO) is proposed. This novel algorithm is a global-convergence-guaranteed and has a better search ability than the original PSO. But like other evolutionary optimization technique, premature in the QPSO is also inevitable. In this paper, we propose a method of controlling the diversity to enable particles to escape the sub-optima more easily. Before describing the new method, we first introduce the origin and development of the PSO and QPSO. The Diversity-Controlled QPSO, along with the PSO and QPSO is tested on several benchmark functions for performance comparison. The experiment results testify that the DCQPSO outperforms the PSO and QPSO. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.