Essential Particle Swarm Optimization queen with Tabu Search for MKP resolution

The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is an innovative and promising optimization technique in evolutionary computation. The Essential Particle Swarm Optimization queen (EPSOq) is one of the recent discrete PSO versions that further simplifies the PSO principles and improves its optimization ability. Hybridization is a principle of combining two (or more) approaches in a wise way such that the resulting algorithm includes the positive features of both (or all) the algorithms. This paper proposes a new heuristic approach such that various features inspired from the Tabu Search are incorporated in the EPSOq algorithm in order to obtain another improved discrete PSO version. The implementation of this idea is identified with the acronym TEPSOq (Tabu Essential Particle Swarm Optimization queen). Experimentally, this approach is able to solve optimally large-scale strongly correlated 0-1 Multidimensional Knapsack Problem (MKP) instances. Computational results show that TEPSOq has outperforms not only the EPSOq, but also other existing PSO-based approaches and some other meta-heuristics in solving the 0-1 MKP. It was discovered also that this algorithm is able to locate solutions extremely close and even equal to the best known results available in the literature.