Enhancing PSO methods for global optimization

The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method is a well-established technique for global optimization. During the past years several variations of the original PSO have been proposed in the relevant literature. Because of the increasing necessity in global optimization methods in almost all fields of science there is a great demand for efficient and fast implementations of relative algorithms. In this work we propose three modi. cations of the original PSO method in order to increase the speed and its efficiency that can be applied independently in almost every PSO variant. These modi. cations are: (a) a new stopping rule, (b) a similarity check and (c) a conditional application of some local search method. The proposed were tested using three popular PSO variants and a variety test functions. We have found that the application of these modi. cations resulted in significant gain in speed and efficiency. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.