Transfer-Based Particle Swarm Optimization for Large-Scale Dynamic Optimization With Changing Variable Interactions

Cooperative coevolutionary algorithms are popular to solve large-scale dynamic optimization problems via divide-and-conquer mechanisms. Their performance depends on how decision variables are grouped and how changing optima are tracked. However, existing decomposition methods are computationally expensive, resulting in limitations under dynamic variable interactions. Quick online decomposition is still a challenging issue, along with solution reconstruction for new subproblems. This article proposes transfer-based particle swarm optimization, which adopts a dynamic differential grouping (DDG) for online decomposition and a solution transfer strategy in response to environmental changes. Particularly, once an environmental change occurs, the DDG readjusts historical groupings based on the change severity of variable interactions. In addition, according to the similarity between subproblems in successive environments, the solution transfer strategy constructs new solutions from historical ones through dimension mapping. Multiple swarms are created to explore subareas of subproblems. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on problem instances up to 1000-D in terms of solution optimality. The DDG obtains accurate groupings using less function evaluations.