A Random Velocity Boundary Condition for Robust Particle Swarm Optimization

• Published in: Bio-Inspired Computational Intelligence and Applications Vol. 4688; pp. 92 - 99
• Main Authors: Li, Jian, Ren, Bo, Wang, Cheng
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Germany Springer Berlin / Heidelberg 2007; Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• ISBN: 3540747680; 9783540747680
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-74769-7_11

The particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a stochastic evolutionary computation technique based on the behavior of swarms that can be used to optimize objects with complex search spaces. However, it has been observed that its performance varies duo to the dimensionality of the object and the location of the global optimum in the search space. This paper introduces a “random” velocity boundary condition to address the problem, where the velocity boundary alters randomly to prevent the velocity of a particle from stopping on a same boundary during the evolution. Simulation results on two benchmark functions with 30 and 300 dimensionalities and three types of locations of the global optimum solutions in the search spaces have shown that with the proposed “random” velocity boundary condition, a highly competitive optimization performance can be obtained for PSO regardless of the dimensionality and the location of the global optimum solution.