Discrete and continuous optimization based on multi-swarm coevolution

This paper presents a novel Multi-swarm Particle Swarm Optimizer called PS2O, which is inspired by the coevolution of symbiotic species in natural ecosystems. The main idea of PS2O is to extend the single population PSO to the interacting multi-swarms model by constructing hierarchical interaction topology and enhanced dynamical update equations. With the hierarchical interaction topology, a suitable diversity in the whole population can be maintained. At the same time, the enhanced dynamical update rule significantly speeds up the multi-swarm to converge to the global optimum. The PS2O algorithm, which is conceptually simple and easy to implement, has considerable potential for solving complex optimization problems. With a set of 17 mathematical benchmark functions (including both continuous and discrete cases), PS2O is proved to have significantly better performance than four other successful variants of PSO.