Knowledge Transfer Strategies for Vector Evaluated Particle Swarm Optimization

Vector evaluated particle swarm optimization (VEPSO) is a multi-swarm variant of the traditional particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm applied to multi-objective problems (MOPs). Each sub-objective is allocated a single sub-swarm and knowledge transfer strategies (KTSs) are used to pass information between swarms. The original VEPSO used a ring KTS, and while VEPSO has shown to be successful in solving MOPs, other algorithms have been shown to produce better results. One reason for VEPSO to perform worse than other algorithms may be due to the inefficiency of the KTS used in the original VEPSO. This paper investigates new KTSs for VEPSO in order to improve its performance. The results indicated that a hybrid strategy using parent-centric crossover (PCX) on global best solutions generally lead to a higher hypervolume while using PCX on archive solutions generally lead to a better distributed set of solutions.