A perturbed particle swarm algorithm for numerical optimization

The canonical particle swarm optimization (PSO) has its own disadvantages, such as the high speed of convergence which often implies a rapid loss of diversity during the optimization process, which inevitably leads to undesirable premature convergence. In order to overcome the disadvantage of PSO, a perturbed particle swarm algorithm (pPSA) is presented based on the new particle updating strategy which is based upon the concept of perturbed global best to deal with the problem of premature convergence and diversity maintenance within the swarm. A linear model and a random model together with the initial max-min model are provided to understand and analyze the uncertainty of perturbed particle updating strategy. pPSA is validated using 12 standard test functions. The preliminary results indicate that pPSO performs much better than PSO both in quality of solutions and robustness and comparable with GCPSO. The experiments confirm us that the perturbed particle updating strategy is an encouraging strategy for stochastic heuristic algorithms and the max-min model is a promising model on the concept of possibility measure. (C) 2009 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.