AMPSO: Artificial Multi-Swarm Particle Swarm Optimization

In this paper we propose a novel artificial multi-swarm PSO which consists of an exploration swarm, an artificial exploitation swarm and an artificial convergence swarm. The exploration swarm is set of equal-sized sub-swarms randomly distributed around the particles space, and the exploitation swarm is artificially generated from a perturbation of the best particle of exploration swarm for a fixed period of iterations, a convergence swarm is artificially generated from a Gaussian perturbation of the best particle of the exploitation swarm as it is stagnated. The exploration and exploitation operations are alternatively conducted until the evolution rate of the exploitation is smaller than a threshold or the maximum number of iterations is reached. An adaptive inertia weight strategy is applied to different swarms to guarantee their performances of exploration and exploitaiton. To guarantee the accuracy of the results, a novel diversity scheme based on the positions and fitness values of the particles is proposed to control the exploration, exploitation and convergence processes of the swarms. To mitigate the inefficiency issue due to the use of diversity, two swarm update techniques are proposed to get rid of lousy particles such that nice results can be achieved within a fixed number of iterations. The effectiveness of AMPSO is validated by a set of comparisons with two recent PSO variants and their corresponding sets of comparison algorithms on the CEC2015 test suite.