An improved particle swarm optimiser based on swarm success rate for global optimisation problems

Abstract

Inertia weight is one of the control parameters that influences the performance of particle swarm optimisation (PSO) in the course of solving global optimisation problems, by striking a balance between exploration and exploitation. Among many inertia weight strategies that have been proposed in literature are chaotic descending inertia weight (CDIW) and chaotic random inertia weight (CRIW). These two strategies have been claimed to perform better than linear descending inertia weight (LDIW) and random inertia weight (RIW). Despite these successes, a closer look at their results reveals that the common problem of premature convergence associated with PSO algorithm still lingers. Motivated by the better performances of CDIW and CRIW, this paper proposed two new inertia weight strategies namely: swarm success rate descending inertia weight (SSRDIW) and swarm success rate random inertia weight (SSRRIW). These two strategies use swarm success rates as a feedback parameter. Efforts were made using the proposed inertia weight strategies with PSO to further improve the effectiveness of the algorithm in terms of convergence speed, global search ability and improved solution accuracy. The proposed PSO variants, SSRDIWPSO and SSRRIWPSO were validated using several benchmark unconstrained global optimisation test problems and their performances compared with LDIW-PSO, CDIW-PSO, RIW-PSO, CRIW-PSO and some other existing PSO variants. Empirical results showed that the proposed variants are more efficient.