Random walk autonomous groups of particles for particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Autonomous groups of particles swarm optimization (AGPSO), inspired by individual diversity in biological swarms such as insects or birds, is a modified particle swarm optimization (PSO) variant. The AGPSO method is simple to understand and easy to implement on a computer. It has achieved an impressive performance on high-dimensional optimization tasks. However, AGPSO also struggles with premature convergence, low solution accuracy and easily falls into local optimum solutions. To overcome these drawbacks, random-walk autonomous group particle swarm optimization (RW-AGPSO) is proposed. In the RW-AGPSO algorithm, Levy flights and dynamically changing weight strategies are introduced to balance exploration and exploitation. The search accuracy and optimization performance of the RW-AGPSO algorithm are verified on 23 well-known benchmark test functions. The experimental results reveal that, for almost all low- and high-dimensional unimodal and multimodal functions, the RW-AGPSO technique has superior optimization performance when compared with three AGPSO variants, four PSO approaches and other recently proposed algorithms. In addition, the performance of the RW-AGPSO has also been tested on the CEC’14 test suite and three real-world engineering problems. The results show that the RW-AGPSO is effective for solving high complexity problems.