An adaptive multi-swarm optimizer for dynamic optimization problems

Date

2014-01-17

Advisors

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

The MIT Press

Type

Conference

Peer reviewed

Yes

Abstract

The multi-population method has been widely used to solve dynamic optimization problems (DOPs) with the aim of maintaining multiple populations on different peaks to locate and track multiple changing optima simultaneously. However, to make this approach effective for solving DOPs, two challenging issues need to be addressed. They are how to adapt the number of populations to changes and how to adaptively maintain the population diversity in a situation where changes are complicated or hard to detect or predict. Tracking the changing global optimum in dynamic environments is difficult because we cannot know when and where changes occur and what the characteristics of changes would be. Therefore, it is necessary to take the challenging issues into account to design such adaptive algorithms. To address the issues when multi-population methods are applied for solving DOPs, this paper proposes an adaptive multi-swarm algorithm, where the populations are enabled to be adaptive in dynamic environments without change detection. An experimental study is conducted based on the moving peaks problem to investigate the behavior of the proposed method. The performance of the proposed algorithm is also compared with a set of algorithms that are based on multi-population methods from different research areas in the literature of evolutionary computation.

Description

Keywords

Multi-population adaptation, dynamic optimization problems, particle swarm optimization

Citation

Li, C. Yang, S. and Yang, M. (2014) An adaptive multi-swarm optimizer for dynamic optimization problems. Evolutionary Computation, online first

Rights

Research Institute