Human behavior-based particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) has attracted many researchers interested in dealing with various optimization problems, owing to its easy implementation, few tuned parameters, and acceptable performance. However, the algorithm is easy to trap in the local optima because of rapid losing of the population diversity. Therefore, improving the performance of PSO and decreasing the dependence on parameters are two important research hot points. In this paper, we present a human behavior-based PSO, which is called HPSO. There are two remarkable differences between PSO and HPSO. First, the global worst particle was introduced into the velocity equation of PSO, which is endowed with random weight which obeys the standard normal distribution; this strategy is conducive to trade off exploration and exploitation ability of PSO. Second, we eliminate the two acceleration coefficients c 1 and c 2 in the standard PSO (SPSO) to reduce the parameters sensitivity of solved problems. Experimental results on 28 benchmark functions, which consist of unimodal, multimodal, rotated, and shifted high-dimensional functions, demonstrate the high performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of convergence accuracy and speed with lower computation cost. © 2014 Hao Liu et al.