On the scalability of particle swarm optimisation

Abstract

Particle swarm has proven to be competitive to other evolutionary algorithms in the field of optimization, and in many cases enables a faster convergence to the ideal solution. However, like any optimization algorithm it seems to have difficulties handling optimization problems of high dimension. Here we first show that dimensionality is really a problem for the classical particle swarm algorithms. We then show that increasing the swarm size can be necessary to handle problem of high dimensions but is not enough. We also show that the issue of scalability occurs more quickly on some functions.