A performance study on synchronicity and neighborhood size in particle swarm optimization

This article presents a performance study on the effect of synchronicity in communications and neighborhood size in Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) on large-scale optimization problems. The algorithms under study are the Synchronous PSO (S-PSO), the Asynchronous PSO (A-PSO), and the recently proposed Random Asynchronous PSO (RA-PSO), all of which are evaluated upon the set of benchmark functions presented at the IEEE CEC'2010 special session and competition on large-scale global optimization. Results show that RA-PSO has the best general performance in large neighborhoods, while S-PSO has the best one in small neighborhoods. Rigorous statistical analyses support our observations and provide a guideline on the performance of the algorithms under different neighborhood sizes.