An adaptive parameter tuning of particle swarm optimization algorithm

An adaptive parameter tuning of particle swarm optimization based on velocity information (APSO-VI) algorithm is proposed. In this paper the velocity convergence of particles is first analyzed and the relationship between the velocity of particle and the search failures is pointed out, which reveals the reasons why PSO has relative poor global searching ability. Then this algorithm introduces the velocity information which is defined as the average absolute value of velocity of all the particles. A new strategy is presented that the inertia weight is dynamically adjusted according to average absolute value of velocity which follows a given nonlinear ideal velocity by feedback control, which can avoid the velocity closed to zero at the early stage. Under the guide of the nonlinear ideal velocity, APSO-VI can maintain appropriate swarm diversity and alleviate the premature convergence validly. Numerical experiments are conducted to compare the proposed algorithm with different variants of PSO on some benchmark functions. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm remarkably improves the ability of PSO to jump out of the local optima and significantly enhance the convergence speed and precision. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.