An Extended Clustering Membrane System Based on Particle Swarm Optimization and Cell-Like P System with Active Membranes

An extended clustering membrane system using a cell-like P system with active membranes based on particle swarm optimization (PSO), named PSO-CP, is designed, developed, implemented, and tested. The purpose of PSO-CP is to solve clustering problems. In PSO-CP, evolution rules based on the standard PSO mechanism are used to evolve the objects and communication rules are adopted to accelerate convergence and avoid prematurity. Subsystems of membranes are generated and dissolved by the membrane creation and dissolution rules, and a modified PSO mechanism is developed to help the objects escape from local optima. Under the control of the evolution-communication mechanism, the extended membrane system can effectively search for the optimal partitioning and improve the clustering performance with the help of the distributed parallel computing model. This extended clustering membrane system is compared with five existing PSO clustering approaches using ten benchmark clustering problems, and the computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of PSO-CP.