A Novel Quantum Inspired Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Electromagnetic Applications

Quantum inspired particle swarm optimization (QPSO) stimulated by perceptions from particle swarm optimization and quantum mechanics is a stochastic optimization method. Although, it has shown good performance in finding the optimal solution to many electromagnetic problems. However, sometimes it falls to local optima when dealing with hard optimization problems. Thus, to preserve a good balance between local and global searches to avoid premature convergence in quantum particle swarm optimization, this paper proposed three enhancements to the original QPSO method, the proposed method is called modified quantum particle swarm optimization (MQPSO) algorithm. Firstly, a novel selection technique is introduced that will choose the best particle among the population within the search domain to achieve a high-performance exploration. Secondly, a new mutation method is used to preserve the easiness of available QPSOs. Also, a dynamic parameter strategy is proposed for further facilitating the algorithm and tradeoff between exploration and exploitation searches. The experimental results obtained by solving standard benchmark functions and an electromagnetic design problem which is the superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) system available in both three parameters and eight parameters problems are reported to showcase the usefulness of the proposed approach.