An Improved Negatively Correlated Search Inspired by Particle Swarm Optimization

Due to its complexity and non-deterministic polynomial-time hard characteristic, multirobot task allocation problem remains a challenging issue in the field of cooperative robotics. Thanks to its easy implementation and promising convergence speed, the particle swarm optimization method has recently aroused increasing research interest in the area of multirobot task allocation problem. However, the efficiency of the standard particle swarm optimization is hindered by several deficiencies such as the inefficient capabilities in balancing exploration and exploitation, as well as the high likelihood of plunging into stagnation. Aiming at enhancing the performance of particle swarm optimization via remedying these two drawbacks, this paper proposes an improved particle swarm optimization method, which integrates standard particle swarm optimization 2011 with evolutionary game theory. To prevent particles being locked into stagnation, particles in the proposed particle swarm optimization first adopt the updating rules of standard particle swarm optimization 2011 to undertake their movements. Subsequently, attempting to well trade off the exploration and exploitation capabilities of particles, a novel self-adaptive strategy, which is determined by the evolutionary stable strategies of evolutionary game theory and the iteration number of particle swarm optimization, is presented to adaptively adjust the main control parameters of particles in the proposed particle swarm optimization. Since the convergence of particle swarm optimization remains paramount and dramatically affects the performance of particle swarm optimization, this paper also analytically investigates the convergence of the proposed particle swarm optimization and provides a convergence-guaranteed parameter selection principle for the proposed method. Finally, leveraging the development of the proposed particle swarm optimization, this paper completes the design of a new particle swarm optimization–based multirobot task allocation method. The performance of the new particle swarm optimization–based multirobot task allocation method is tested through three different allocation cases against four well-known evolutionary methods. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method generally outperforms its contenders in terms of the solution quality. Moreover, the proposed method performs slightly better than the majority of its peers as far as the computation time is concerned.

Particle swarm optimisation (PSO) was developed by Kennedy and Eberhart in 1995 (Kennedy & Eberhart, 1995) inspired by the collective behaviour of natural birds or fish. PSO is a stochastic optimisation technique that uses a behaviour of population composed by many search points called particle. In spite of easy implementation in computer algorithms, it is well known as a powerful numerical optimizer. In the typical PSO algorithms, a set of particles searches the optimal solution in the problem space efficiently, by sharing the common attractor called global best. There are many modified versions of PSO by improving convergence property to a certain problem. While, a standard PSO is defined by Bratton and Kennedy (Bratton & Kennedy, 2007) to give a real standard for PSO studies. PSO seems as one of the evolutionary computations (ECs), and it has been shown that PSO is comparable to a genetic algorithm (Angeline, 1998). Thus, a lot of studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of PSO family in optimizing various continuous and discrete optimization problems. And a plenty of applications of PSO, such as the neural network training, PID controller tuning, electric system optimisation have been studied and achieved well results (Kennedy, 1997). However, PSO is often failed in searching the global optimal solution in the case of the objective function has a large number of dimensions. The reason of this phenomenon is not only existence of the local optimal solutions, the velocities of the particles sometimes lapsed into the degeneracy, so that the successive range is restricted in the sub-plain of the whole search hyper-plain. The sub-plane that is defined by finite number of particle velocities is a partial space in the whole search space. The issue of local optima in PSO has been studied and proposed several modifications on the basic particle driven equation (Parsopoulos et al., 2001; Hendtlass, 2005; Liang et al., 2006). There used a kind of adaptation technique or randomized method (e.g. mutation in evolutionary computations) to keep particles velocities or to accelerate them. Although such improvements work well and have ability to avoid fall in the local optima, the problem of early convergence by the degeneracy of some dimensions is still remaining, even if there are no local optima. Hence the PSO algorithm does not always work well for the high-dimensional function.

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a powerful stochastic evolutionary algorithm that is used to find the global optimum solution in search space. However, PSO often easily fall into local minima because the particles could quickly converge to a position by the attraction of the best particles. Under this circumstance, all the particles could hardly be improved. This paper presents a hybrid PSO, namely LSPSO, to solve this problem by employing an adaptive local search operator. Experimental results on 8 well-known benchmark problems show that LSPSO achieves better results than the standard PSO, PSO with Gaussian mutation and PSO with Cauchy mutation on majority of test problems.

<p>Classification problems often have a large number of features, but not all of them are useful for classification. Irrelevant and redundant features may even reduce the classification accuracy. Feature selection is a process of selecting a subset of relevant features, which can decrease the dimensionality, shorten the running time, and/or improve the classification accuracy. There are two types of feature selection approaches, i.e. wrapper and filter approaches. Their main difference is that wrappers use a classification algorithm to evaluate the goodness of the features during the feature selection process while filters are independent of any classification algorithm. Feature selection is a difficult task because of feature interactions and the large search space. Existing feature selection methods suffer from different problems, such as stagnation in local optima and high computational cost. Evolutionary computation (EC) techniques are well-known global search algorithms. Particle swarm optimisation (PSO) is an EC technique that is computationally less expensive and can converge faster than other methods. PSO has been successfully applied to many areas, but its potential for feature selection has not been fully investigated. The overall goal of this thesis is to investigate and improve the capability of PSO for feature selection to select a smaller number of features and achieve similar or better classification performance than using all features. This thesis investigates the use of PSO for both wrapper and filter, and for both single objective and multi-objective feature selection, and also investigates the differences between wrappers and filters. This thesis proposes a new PSO based wrapper, single objective feature selection approach by developing new initialisation and updating mechanisms. The results show that by considering the number of features in the initialisation and updating procedures, the new algorithm can improve the classification performance, reduce the number of features and decrease computational time. This thesis develops the first PSO based wrapper multi-objective feature selection approach, which aims to maximise the classification accuracy and simultaneously minimise the number of features. The results show that the proposed multi-objective algorithm can obtain more and better feature subsets than single objective algorithms, and outperform other well-known EC based multi-objective feature selection algorithms. This thesis develops a filter, single objective feature selection approach based on PSO and information theory. Two measures are proposed to evaluate the relevance of the selected features based on each pair of features and a group of features, respectively. The results show that PSO and information based algorithms can successfully address feature selection tasks. The group based method achieves higher classification accuracies, but the pair based method is faster and selects smaller feature subsets. This thesis proposes the first PSO based multi-objective filter feature selection approach using information based measures. This work is also the first work using other two well-known multi-objective EC algorithms in filter feature selection, which are also used to compare the performance of the PSO based approach. The results show that the PSO based multiobjective filter approach can successfully address feature selection problems, outperform single objective filter algorithms and achieve better classification performance than other multi-objective algorithms. This thesis investigates the difference between wrapper and filter approaches in terms of the classification performance and computational time, and also examines the generality of wrappers. The results show that wrappers generally achieve better or similar classification performance than filters, but do not always need longer computational time than filters. The results also show that wrappers built with simple classification algorithms can be general to other classification algorithms.</p>

Evolutionary optimization algorithms, including particle swarm optimization (PSO), have been successfully applied in oil industry for production planning and control. Such optimization studies are quite challenging due to large number of decision variables, production scenarios, and subsurface uncertainties. In this work, multi-stage, multi-swarm PSO (MS2PSO) algorithm is proposed to fix certain issues with canonical PSO algorithm such as premature convergence, excessive influence of global best solution, and oscillation. Multiple experiments are conducted using Olympus benchmark to compare the efficacy of algorithms. Results from canonical PSO are first compared with two PSO variations in which hyperparameters are tuned to prioritize exploration in early phase and exploitation in late phase. Firstly, linearly decreasing inertia weight (LDIW-PSO) is used to have greater weight of current particle position during initial iterations, and vice versa. Then, time-varying acceleration coefficients (TVAC-PSO) are used to have greater weight of personal best and lesser weight of global best during the initial iterations, and vice versa. Next, a two-stage multi-swarm PSO (2SPSO) is used where multiple-swarms of the first stage collapse into a single swarm in the second stage. Finally, MS2PSO with multiple stages and multiple swarms is used in which swarms recursively collapse after each stage. Multiple swarm strategy ensures that diversity is retained within the population and multiple modes are explored. Staging ensures that local optima found during initial stage does not lead to premature convergence. Optimization test case comprises of 90 control variables of which 72 are well control related and 18 are well placement related. Swarm intelligence refers to global patterns emerging from simple interactions among population. Algorithmic rules at micro level lead to social interaction at meso level, which then further leads to collective behavior at macro level. It is observed that different algorithm designs have their own benefits and drawbacks. Decreasing inertia weight in LDIW-PSO enables exploration in early stages and convergence around global best in the later stages. TVAC-PSO on the other hand restricts social learning and aids exploration in the early iterations. Social learning component is increased as run progresses, and population moves towards global best. 2SPSO aids in exploring multi-modal objective space, thus preventing premature convergence to a local optima. Swarms collapse into one group in the second stage, and run finally converges towards global best. Multiple swarms and stages in MS2PSO ensure that diversity in population is maintained throughout the run which enables continuous learning, and thus mitigates premature convergence. Both 2SPSO and MS2PSO are found to be helpful for problems with high dimensions and multiple modes where greater degree of exploration is desired. Commercial cloud computing and parallel programming were used to handle high computational workload and reduce run-time from weeks to days. Coefficients of canonical PSO are tuned in LDIW-PSO and TVAC-PSO, which helps in mitigating issues like premature convergence and oscillation. Two-stage PSO (2SPSO) where multiple swarms of first stage collapse into one in second stage, and multi-stage multi-swarm PSO (MS2PSO) where swarms recursively collapse into one are proposed. These algorithms modify the social behavior at meso scale based on number of swarms, number of stages and iterations in each stage.

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a recently developed optimization method that has attracted interest of researchers in various areas. PSO has been shown to be effective in solving a variety of complex optimization problems. With properly chosen parameters, PSO can converge to local optima. However, conventional PSO does not have global convergence. Empirical evidences indicate that the PSO algorithm may fail to reach global optimal solutions for complex problems. We propose to combine the branch-and-bound framework with the particle swarm optimization algorithm. With this integrated approach, convergence to global optimal solutions is theoretically guaranteed. We have developed and implemented the BB-PSO algorithm that combines the efficiency of PSO and effectiveness of the branch-and-bound method. The BB-PSO method was tested with a set of standard benchmark optimization problems. Experimental results confirm that BB-PSO is effective in finding global optimal solutions to problems that may cause difficulties for the PSO algorithm.

A hybrid algorithm based on particle swarm and chemical reaction optimization for multi-object problems

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) has previously been parallelized primarily by distributing the computation corresponding to particles across multiple processors. In these approaches, the only benefit of additional processors is an increased swarm size. However, in many cases this is not efficient when scaled to very large swarm sizes (on very large clusters). Current methods cannot answer well the question: “How can 1000 processors be fully utilized when 50 or 100 particles is the most efficient swarm size?” In this paper we attempt to answer that question with a speculative approach to the parallelization of PSO that we refer to as SEPSO. In our approach, we refactor PSO such that the computation needed for iteration t+1 can be done concurrently with the computation needed for iteration t. Thus we can perform two iterations of PSO at once. Even with some amount of wasted computation, we show that this approach to parallelization in PSO often outperforms the standard parallelization of simply adding particles to the swarm. SEPSO produces results that are exactly equivalent to PSO; that is, SEPSO is a new method of parallelization and not a new PSO algorithm or variant. However, given this new parallelization model, we can relax the requirement of exactly reproducing PSO in an attempt to produce better results. We present several such relaxations, including keeping the best speculative position evaluated instead of the one corresponding to the standard behavior of PSO, and speculating several iterations ahead instead of just one. We show that these methods dramatically improve the performance of parallel PSO in many cases, giving speed ups of up to six compared to previous parallelization techniques.

Generation bidding strategy in a pool based electricity market using Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm

Optimum PID controller design using real coded genetic algorithm (RGA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) is addressed in this paper. The lower and upper bound of the design variables (KP, TI and TD) are selected in an intelligent manner around the values obtained from Ziegler-Nichols method. PID controller was designed by minimizing various performance measures such as ISE, IAE and ITAE for two different linear systems. The performance of RGA and PSO is compared with respect to time-response specifications, computation time and statistical performance in 20 independent trials. The simulation reveals that the performance of PSO and RGA with simulated binary crossover (SBX) produced almost same time-domain performances and take same computation time. Also, it is found that PSO converges with less number of functional evaluations, consistent for simple systems and in general ITAE is preferable for quick settling time.

Microgrid becomes an attractive concept to meet the rapidly increasing demands for energy in worldwide and deal with air pollutions. Distributed energy resources (DERs) in Microgrid are the vital role to meet the demand of the grid locally. The performance and the PV source grid connected system's response depend on vital parameters like transient response, voltage or current overshoot, steady state error, and harmonics distortions. This research aims to optimize the proportional-integral (PI) controller for improving power quality performance and energy management of the PV battery of three phase inverter of grid connected mode scheme. Besides to the PI conventional method, three different meta-heuristic optimization algorithms are proposed and implemented in order to enhance the PI and hence all system parameters. These three algorithms are (Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), Dragonfly Algorithm (DA)) that can tune the PI controller's parameters by minimizing voltage regulator error, hence approving the goal of optimization in finding the optimal local or global solutions. The experimental results have been demonstrating the variety and the effectiveness of these optimization methods in convergence generation, computation time, and improving all required system parameters.

The performance of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) brings attention to the field of algorithms when deals with different optimization problems. Due to her simple implementation, small consumption, and very effective in finding a solution in many problems, (PSO) becomes well known to the field of algorithms. In addition, the late proposed algorithms mostly are compared to the well-known algorithm such as PSO. Thus, the Global African Buffalo Optimization (GABO) was proposed lately and yet not been compared to the old well-known algorithms in terms of accuracy and time consumption. However, in this paper, a comparison between Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Global African Buffalo Optimization (GABO) algorithms was performed. Five different nonlinear equations with their upper and lower boundaries values were selected as the test optimization functions problem in addition to PSO was applied to real case study. The experimental results illustrated the differences in the performances of both algorithms toward the optimum solution. At the end of the experiments, the PSO algorithm quickly convergence towards the optimum solution using a few particles and iterations rather than GABO. However, the experimental result showed that PSO achieved good results in all the test cases within a short time. In many cases, PSO and GABO are promising optimization methods.

Parallel Global Best-Worst Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for solving optimization problems

In this paper, we present a concept of a transistor level implementation of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm that belongs to the group of unsupervised learning algorithms aimed at the design of artificial neural networks (ANNs). The algorithm exhibits an ability to search for an optimal solution in a multidimensional data space, in which many sub-optimal solutions may exist. The ANN that operates in accordance with the PSO algorithm is composed of a set of cooperating particles (agents) that explore an input data space and communicate information on the best found solution to other particles. The PSO algorithm is usually implemented in software. We in our investigations focus on its transistor level realization. Such an approach enables parallel data processing, in which the overall data rate only moderately depends on the number of particles. Most of the operations and components of such implemented PSO algorithm may be reused considering our former CMOS realizations of other self-organizing learning algorithms. This allowed us to assess main parameters of the PSO.

An efficient and most famous tool to enhance damping of the power system low frequency oscillations is the conventional widely used lead-lag Power System Stabilizer (PSS). To achieve the desired level of robust performance under transient situation, selecting a suitable design method for optimal tuning of PSS parameters is very important in multi-machine power system. Because, it is a multimodal and difficult combinatorial optimization problem, this paper presents a novel parameter automation strategy for Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) called PSO with Time-Varying Acceleration Coefficients (PSO-TVAC). This optimization method has a strong ability to successfully control both global and local search in each iteration process for considerably increasing the probability of finding the global optimum solution. The PSO-TVAC algorithm is applied to optimal tuning PSS parameters problem in order to reduce the PSS design effort and find the best possible solution within a reasonable computation time. For this reason, the robustly selection of PSSs parameters is converted as an optimization problem based on the time domain-based objective function under different operating conditions. The robustness of the proposed method is demonstrated on a multi-machine power system in comparison with the classical PSO and conventional method based designed PSSs. It is shown through the nonlinear time domain simulation and some performance indices for a wide range of loading condition. The analysis of the results shows that the improved PSO-TVAC is not only very effective but also provides an excellent ability for damping low frequency oscillations and greatly enhance the dynamic stability of the power system. Moreover, the proposed PSO-TVAC algorithm is superior than that of the classical PSO one in terms of accuracy, convergence and computational effort. Key words: Power system stabilizer (PSS) design, particle swarm optimization, power system dynamics, time-varying acceleration coefficients.