A New Cooperative PSO Approach with Landscape Estimation, Dimension Partition, and Velocity Control

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been proposed as an alternative to traditional evolutionary algorithms. Yet, more efficient strategies are still needed to control the trade-off between exploitation and exploration in the search process for solving complex tasks with high dimensional and multimodal objective functions. In this work, the authors propose a new PSO approach to overcome the search difficulties. Their approach first predicts the landscape type of a function for initial search settings, and then focuses on two search strategies for multimodal functions. One is a two-swarm cooperative strategy that controls search region and integrates partial and full dimension PSO search. The other strategy is to control the velocity of the particles in an adaptive way, according to how they move in the space. To evaluate the proposed approach, extensive experiments have been conducted and comparisons to several popular PSO variants have been made. Our experiments prove that the proposed approach can have better performance than others in most of the test cases. A New Cooperative PSO Approach with Landscape Estimation, Dimension Partition, and Velocity Control