An Improved Chaotic Optimization Algorithm Applied to a DC Electrical Motor Modeling

The chaos-based optimization algorithm (COA) is a method to optimize possibly nonlinear complex functions of several variables by chaos search. The main innovation behind the chaos-based optimization algorithm is to generate chaotic trajectories by means of nonlinear, discrete-time dynamical systems to explore the search space while looking for the global minimum of a complex criterion function. The aim of the present research is to investigate the numerical properties of the COA, both on complex optimization test-functions from the literature and on a real-world problem, to contribute to the understanding of its global-search features. In addition, the present research suggests a refinement of the original COA algorithm to improve its optimization performances. In particular, the real-world optimization problem tackled within the paper is the estimation of six electro-mechanical parameters of a model of a direct-current (DC) electrical motor. A large number of test results prove that the algorithm achieves an excellent numerical precision at a little expense in the computational complexity, which appears as extremely limited, compared to the complexity of other benchmark optimization algorithms, namely, the genetic algorithm and the simulated annealing algorithm.