Particle Swarm Optimization for Imprecise Problems

2. INTRODUCTION In most engineering applications optimization problems of continuous or discrete nature arise very often, making thus optimization techniques of undisputed importance in science and technology. Applications of them can be met in many scientific fields. Indeed, many recent advances in science, economics and engineering rely on numerical techniques for computing globally optimal solutions to corresponding optimization problems [10]. Usually, due to the existence of multiple local and global optima, these problems cannot be solved by classical nonlinear programming techniques.