HIDMS-PSO with Bio-inspired Fission-Fusion Behaviour and a Quorum Decision Mechanism

In this study, we propose a new variant of the HIDMS-PSO algorithm with a bio-inspired fission-fusion behaviour and a quorum decision mechanism (FFQ-HIDMS-PSO). In the new algorithm, units are conceptualised as self-organising fission-fusion societies that determine and adopt a suitable behaviour using unit-based quorum decisions. The incorporation of the two bio-inspired mechanisms provide "diversity aware" self-organising units that react to stagnation of particles by adopting a suitable fission-fusion behaviour, leading to a more efficient algorithm capable of maintaining significantly better population diversity throughout the search. The performance of the proposed algorithm was verified with three distinct experiments conducted using CEC’17 and CEC’05 test suites at 30 and 50 dimensions, comparing against 12 state-of-the-art metaheuristics and 12 state-of-the-art PSO variants. The proposed algorithm showed superior performance in these experiments by outperforming all 24 algorithms in all three experiments at 30 and 50 dimensions. The empirical evidence suggests that the proposed method also maintains significantly superior population diversity in comparison to the original HIDMS-PSO.