Particle Swarm Optimization Based on a Novel Evaluation of Diversity

In this paper, we propose a particle swarm optimization variant based on a novel evaluation of diversity (PSO-ED). By a novel encoding of the sub-space of the search space and the hash table technique, the diversity of the swarm can be evaluated efficiently without any information compression. This paper proposes a notion of exploration degree based on the diversity of the swarm in the exploration, exploitation, and convergence states to characterize the degree of demand for the dispersion of the swarm. Further, a disturbance update mode is proposed to help the particles jump to the promising regions while reducing the cost of function evaluations for poor particles. The effectiveness of PSO-ED is validated on the CEC2015 test suite by comparison with seven popular PSO variants out of 12 benchmark functions; PSO-ED achieves six best results for both 10-D and 30-D.