A novel parallel multi-swarm algorithm based on comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization

This article presented a parallel metaheuristic algorithm based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to solve global optimization problems. In recent years, many metaheuristic algorithms have been developed. The PSO is one of them is very effective to solve these problems. But PSO has some shortcomings such as premature convergence and getting stuck in local minima. To overcome these shortcomings, many variants of PSO have been proposed. The comprehensive learning particle swarm optimizer (CLPSO) is one of them. We proposed a better variation of CLPSO, called the parallel comprehensive learning particle swarm optimizer (PCLPSO) which has multiple swarms based on the master-slave paradigm and works cooperatively and concurrently. The PCLPSO algorithm was compared with nine PSO variants in the experiments. It showed a great performance over the other PSO variants in solving benchmark functions including their large scale versions. Besides, it solved extremely fast the large scale problems. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.