Constraint Handling in Particle Swarm Optimization

In this article, the authors propose a particle swarm optimization (PSO) for constrained optimization. The proposed PSO adopts a multiobjective approach to constraint handling. Procedures to update the feasible and infeasible personal best are designed to encourage finding feasible regions and convergence toward the Pareto front. In addition, the infeasible nondominated solutions are stored in the global best archive to exploit the hidden information for guiding the particles toward feasible regions. Furthermore, the number of feasible personal best in the personal best memory and the scalar constraint violations of personal best and global best are used to adapt the acceleration constants in the PSO flight equations. The purpose is to find more feasible particles and search for better solutions during the process. The mutation procedure is applied to encourage global and fine-tune local searches. The simulation results indicate that the proposed constrained PSO is highly competitive, achieving promising performance. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1592-2.ch004