A decreasing inertia weight particle swarm optimizer

It has been over ten years since the pioneering work of particle swarm optimization (PSO) espoused by Kennedy and Eberhart. Since then, various modifications, well suited to particular application areas, have been reported widely in the literature. The evolutionary concept of PSO is clear-cut in nature, easy to implement in practice, and computationally efficient in comparison to other evolutionary algorithms. The above-mentioned merits are primarily the motivation of this article to investigate PSO when applied to continuous optimization problems. The performance of conventional PSO on the solution quality and convergence speed deteriorates when the function to be optimized is multimodal or with a large problem size. Toward that end, it is of great practical value to develop a modified particle swarm optimizer suitable for solving high-dimensional, multimodal optimization problems. In the first part of the article, the design of experiments (DOE) has been conducted comprehensively to examine the influences of each parameter in PSO. Based upon the DOE results, a modified PSO algorithm, termed Decreasing-Weight Particle Swarm Optimization (DW-PSO), is addressed. Two performance measures, the success rate and number of function evaluations, are used to evaluate the proposed method. The computational comparisons with the existing PSO algorithms show that DW-PSO exhibits a noticeable advantage, especially when it is performed to solve high-dimensional problems.