Discontinuous flying particle swarm optimization algorithm and its application to slope stability analysis

A new version of particle swarm optimization (PSO) called discontinuous flying particle swarm optimization (DFPSO) was proposed, where not all of the particles refreshed their positions and velocities during each iteration step and the probability of each particle in refreshing its position and velocity was dependent on its objective function value. The effect of population size on the results was investigated. The results obtained by DFPSO have an average difference of 6% compared with those by PSO, whereas DFPSO consumes much less evaluations of objective function than PSO does.