Showing papers on "Metaheuristic published in 2015"

A Comprehensive Survey on Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm and Its Applications

Abstract: Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a heuristic global optimization method, proposed originally by Kennedy and Eberhart in 1995. It is now one of the most commonly used optimization techniques. This survey presented a comprehensive investigation of PSO. On one hand, we provided advances with PSO, including its modifications (including quantum-behaved PSO, bare-bones PSO, chaotic PSO, and fuzzy PSO), population topology (as fully connected, von Neumann, ring, star, random, etc.), hybridization (with genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, Tabu search, artificial immune system, ant colony algorithm, artificial bee colony, differential evolution, harmonic search, and biogeography-based optimization), extensions (to multiobjective, constrained, discrete, and binary optimization), theoretical analysis (parameter selection and tuning, and convergence analysis), and parallel implementation (in multicore, multiprocessor, GPU, and cloud computing forms). On the other hand, we offered a survey on applications of PSO to the following eight fields: electrical and electronic engineering, automation control systems, communication theory, operations research, mechanical engineering, fuel and energy, medicine, chemistry, and biology. It is hoped that this survey would be beneficial for the researchers studying PSO algorithms.

A Competitive Swarm Optimizer for Large Scale Optimization

Abstract: In this paper, a novel competitive swarm optimizer (CSO) for large scale optimization is proposed. The algorithm is fundamentally inspired by the particle swarm optimization but is conceptually very different. In the proposed CSO, neither the personal best position of each particle nor the global best position (or neighborhood best positions) is involved in updating the particles. Instead, a pairwise competition mechanism is introduced, where the particle that loses the competition will update its position by learning from the winner. To understand the search behavior of the proposed CSO, a theoretical proof of convergence is provided, together with empirical analysis of its exploration and exploitation abilities showing that the proposed CSO achieves a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Despite its algorithmic simplicity, our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed CSO exhibits a better overall performance than five state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms on a set of widely used large scale optimization problems and is able to effectively solve problems of dimensionality up to 5000.

Elephant Herding Optimization

Abstract: In this paper, a new kind of swarm-based metaheuristic search method, called Elephant Herding Optimization (EHO), is proposed for solving optimization tasks The EHO method is inspired by the herding behavior of elephant group In nature, the elephants belonging to different clans live together under the leadership of a matriarch, and the male elephants will leave their family group when they grow up These two behaviors can be modelled into two following operators: clan updating operator and separating operator In EHO, the elephants in each clan are updated by its current position and matriarch through clan updating operator It is followed by the implementation of the separating operator which can enhance the population diversity at the later search phase To demonstrate its effectiveness, EHO is benchmarked by fifteen test cases comparing with BBO, DE and GA The results show that EHO can find the better values on most benchmark problems than those three metaheuristic algorithms

Stochastic Fractal Search

Abstract: Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are well-known terms in many science fields. EAs usually interfere with science problems when common mathematical methods are unable to provide a good solution or finding the exact solution requires an unreasonable amount of time. Nowadays, many EA methods have been proposed and developed. Most of them imitate natural behavior, such as swarm animal movement. In this paper, inspired by the natural phenomenon of growth, a new metaheuristic algorithm is presented that uses a mathematic concept called the fractal. Using the diffusion property which is seen regularly in random fractals, the particles in the new algorithm explore the search space more efficiently. To verify the performance of our approach, both the constrained and unconstrained standard benchmark functions are employed. Some classic functions including unimodal and multimodal functions, as well as some modern hard functions, are employed as unconstrained benchmark functions; On the other hand, some well-known engineering design optimization problems commonly used in the literature are considered as constrained benchmark functions. Numerical results and comparisons with other state of the art stochastic algorithms are also provided. Considering both convergence and accuracy simultaneously, experimental results prove that the proposed method performs significantly better than other previous well-known metaheuristic algorithms in terms of avoiding getting stuck in local minimums, and finding the global minimum.

A Comprehensive Review of Swarm Optimization Algorithms

Abstract: Many swarm optimization algorithms have been introduced since the early 60’s, Evolutionary Programming to the most recent, Grey Wolf Optimization. All of these algorithms have demonstrated their potential to solve many optimization problems. This paper provides an in-depth survey of well-known optimization algorithms. Selected algorithms are briefly explained and compared with each other comprehensively through experiments conducted using thirty well-known benchmark functions. Their advantages and disadvantages are also discussed. A number of statistical tests are then carried out to determine the significant performances. The results indicate the overall advantage of Differential Evolution (DE) and is closely followed by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), compared with other considered approaches.

Heterogeneous comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization with enhanced exploration and exploitation

Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization algorithm with enhanced exploration and exploitation, named as “heterogeneous comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization” (HCLPSO). In this algorithm, the swarm population is divided into two subpopulations. Each subpopulation is assigned to focus solely on either exploration or exploitation. Comprehensive learning (CL) strategy is used to generate the exemplars for both subpopulations. In the exploration-subpopulation, the exemplars are generated by using personal best experiences of the particles in the exploration-subpopulation itself. In the exploitation-subpopulation, the personal best experiences of the entire swarm population are used to generate the exemplars. As the exploration-subpopulation does not learn from any particles in the exploitation-subpopulation, the diversity in the exploration-subpopulation can be retained even if the exploitation-subpopulation converges prematurely. The heterogeneous comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization algorithm is tested on shifted and rotated benchmark problems and compared with other recent particle swarm optimization algorithms to demonstrate superior performance of the proposed algorithm over other particle swarm optimization variants.

A new hybrid method based on Particle Swarm Optimization, Ant Colony Optimization and 3-Opt algorithms for Traveling Salesman Problem

Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the standard test problems used in performance analysis of discrete optimization algorithms. The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm appears among heuristic algorithms used for solving discrete optimization problems. In this study, a new hybrid method is proposed to optimize parameters that affect performance of the ACO algorithm using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). In addition, 3-Opt heuristic method is added to proposed method in order to improve local solutions. The PSO algorithm is used for detecting optimum values of parameters α and β which are used for city selection operations in the ACO algorithm and determines significance of inter-city pheromone and distances. The 3-Opt algorithm is used for the purpose of improving city selection operations, which could not be improved due to falling in local minimums by the ACO algorithm. The performance of proposed hybrid method is investigated on ten different benchmark problems taken from literature and it is compared to the performance of some well-known algorithms. Experimental results show that the performance of proposed method by using fewer ants than the number of cities for the TSPs is better than the performance of compared methods in most cases in terms of solution quality and robustness.

A social spider algorithm for global optimization

Abstract: Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted HighlightsWe propose a new nature-inspired social-spider-based swarm intelligence algorithm.We introduce a new social animal foraging model into meta-heuristic design.We introduce the design of information loss to handle pre-mature convergence.We perform a series of benchmark simulations to demonstrate the performance.We investigate the impact of control parameters on optimization results. The growing complexity of real-world problems has motivated computer scientists to search for efficient problem-solving methods. Metaheuristics based on evolutionary computation and swarm intelligence are outstanding examples of nature-inspired solution techniques. Inspired by the social spiders, we propose a novel social spider algorithm to solve global optimization problems. This algorithm is mainly based on the foraging strategy of social spiders, utilizing the vibrations on the spider web to determine the positions of preys. Different from the previously proposed swarm intelligence algorithms, we introduce a new social animal foraging strategy model to solve optimization problems. In addition, we perform preliminary parameter sensitivity analysis for our proposed algorithm, developing guidelines for choosing the parameter values. The social spider algorithm is evaluated by a series of widely used benchmark functions, and our proposed algorithm has superior performance compared with other state-of-the-art metaheuristics.

A Multi-Objective Optimization Scheduling Method Based on the Ant Colony Algorithm in Cloud Computing

Abstract: For task-scheduling problems in cloud computing, a multi-objective optimization method is proposed here. First, with an aim toward the biodiversity of resources and tasks in cloud computing, we propose a resource cost model that defines the demand of tasks on resources with more details. This model reflects the relationship between the user’s resource costs and the budget costs. A multi-objective optimization scheduling method has been proposed based on this resource cost model. This method considers the makespan and the user’s budget costs as constraints of the optimization problem, achieving multi-objective optimization of both performance and cost. An improved ant colony algorithm has been proposed to solve this problem. Two constraint functions were used to evaluate and provide feedback regarding the performance and budget cost. These two constraint functions made the algorithm adjust the quality of the solution in a timely manner based on feedback in order to achieve the optimal solution. Some simulation experiments were designed to evaluate this method’s performance using four metrics: 1) the makespan; 2) cost; 3) deadline violation rate; and 4) resource utilization. Experimental results show that based on these four metrics, a multi-objective optimization method is better than other similar methods, especially as it increased 56.6% in the best case scenario.

TSA: Tree-seed algorithm for continuous optimization

Abstract: This paper presents a new intelligent optimizer based on the relation between trees and their seeds for continuous optimization. The new method is in the field of heuristic and population-based search. The location of trees and seeds on n-dimensional search space corresponds with the possible solution of an optimization problem. One or more seeds are produced from the trees and the better seed locations are replaced with the locations of trees. While the new locations for seeds are produced, either the best solution or another tree location is considered with the tree location. This consideration is performed by using a control parameter named as search tendency (ST), and this process is executed for a pre-defined number of iterations. These mechanisms provide to balance exploitation and exploration capabilities of the proposed approach. In the experimental studies, the effects of control parameters on the performance of the method are firstly examined on 5 well-known basic numeric functions. The performance of the proposed method is also investigated on the 24 benchmark functions with 2, 3, 4, 5 dimensions and multilevel thresholding problems. The obtained results are also compared with the results of state-of-art methods such as artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, particle swarm optimization (PSO), harmony search (HS) algorithm, firefly algorithm (FA) and the bat algorithm (BA). Experimental results show that the proposed method named as TSA is better than the state-of-art methods in most cases on numeric function optimization and is an alternative optimization method for solving multilevel thresholding problem.

Water cycle algorithm for solving constrained multi-objective optimization problems

Abstract: Multi-objective water cycle algorithm (MOWCA) is proposed for solving constrained and engineering multi-objective problems.Generational distance, metric of spread, and Δ metric are used as performance criteria.Optimal Pareto fronts are finely covered by the MOWCA with a good distribution of the non-dominated solutions.MOWCA is able to approach a full optimal Pareto front and provide a superior quality of solutions.MOWCA is better able to find a wider range of solutions compared with the other optimizers in this paper. In this paper, a metaheuristic optimizer, the multi-objective water cycle algorithm (MOWCA), is presented for solving constrained multi-objective problems. The MOWCA is based on emulation of the water cycle process in nature. In this study, a set of non-dominated solutions obtained by the proposed algorithm is kept in an archive to be used to display the exploratory capability of the MOWCA as compared to other efficient methods in the literature. Moreover, to make a comprehensive assessment about the robustness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, the obtained optimization results are also compared with other widely used optimizers for constrained and engineering design problems. The comparisons are carried out using tabular, descriptive, and graphical presentations.

Simultaneous Reconfiguration, Optimal Placement of DSTATCOM, and Photovoltaic Array in a Distribution System Based on Fuzzy-ACO Approach

Abstract: In this paper, a combination of a fuzzy multiobjective approach and ant colony optimization (ACO) as a metaheuristic algorithm is used to solve the simultaneous reconfiguration and optimal allocation (size and location) of photovoltaic (PV) arrays as a distributed generation (DG) and distribution static compensator (DSTATCOM) as a distribution flexible ac transmission system (DFACT) device in a distribution system. The purpose of this research includes loss reduction, voltage profile (VP) improvement, and increase in the feeder load balancing (LB). The proposed method is validated using the IEEE 33-bus test system and a Tai-Power 11.4-kV distribution system as a real distribution network. The results proved that simultaneous reconfiguration and optimal allocation of PV array and DSTATCOM unit leads to significantly reduced losses, improved VP, and increased LB. Obtained results have been compared with the base value and found that simultaneous placement of PV and DSTATCOM along with reconfiguration is more beneficial than separate single-objective optimization. Also, the proposed fuzzy-ACO approach is more accurate as compared to ACO and other intelligent techniques like fuzzy-genetic algorithm (GA) and fuzzy-particle swarm optimization (PSO).

A Social Spider Algorithm for Global Optimization

Abstract: The growing complexity of real-world problems has motivated computer scientists to search for efficient problem-solving methods. Metaheuristics based on evolutionary computation and swarm intelligence are outstanding examples of nature-inspired solution techniques. Inspired by the social spiders, we propose a novel Social Spider Algorithm to solve global optimization problems. This algorithm is mainly based on the foraging strategy of social spiders, utilizing the vibrations on the spider web to determine the positions of preys. Different from the previously proposed swarm intelligence algorithms, we introduce a new social animal foraging strategy model to solve optimization problems. In addition, we perform preliminary parameter sensitivity analysis for our proposed algorithm, developing guidelines for choosing the parameter values. The Social Spider Algorithm is evaluated by a series of widely-used benchmark functions, and our proposed algorithm has superior performance compared with other state-of-the-art metaheuristics.

Adaptive Multiobjective Particle Swarm Optimization Based on Parallel Cell Coordinate System

Abstract: Managing convergence and diversity is essential in the design of multiobjective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) in search of an accurate and well distributed approximation of the true Pareto-optimal front. Largely due to its fast convergence, particle swarm optimization incurs a rapid loss of diversity during the evolutionary process. Many mechanisms have been proposed in existing MOPSOs in terms of leader selection, archive maintenance, and perturbation to tackle this deficiency. However, few MOPSOs are designed to dynamically adjust the balance in exploration and exploitation according to the feedback information detected from the evolutionary environment. In this paper, a novel method, named parallel cell coordinate system (PCCS), is proposed to assess the evolutionary environment including density, rank, and diversity indicators based on the measurements of parallel cell distance, potential, and distribution entropy, respectively. Based on PCCS, strategies proposed for selecting global best and personal best, maintaining archive, adjusting flight parameters, and perturbing stagnation are integrated into a self-adaptive MOPSO (pccsAMOPSO). The comparative experimental results show that the proposed pccsAMOPSO outperforms the other eight state-of-the-art competitors on ZDT and DTLZ test suites in terms of the chosen performance metrics. An additional experiment for density estimation in MOPSO illustrates that the performance of PCCS is superior to that of adaptive grid and crowding distance in terms of convergence and diversity.

Artificial algae algorithm (AAA) for nonlinear global optimization

Abstract: This study proposes a novel bio-inspired metaheuristic optimization algorithm called artificial algae algorithm (AAA).The algorithm is based on evolutionary process, adaptation process and the movement of microalgae.The performance of the algorithm has been verified on various benchmark functions and a real-world design optimization problem.The results show that AAA is a balanced and consistent algorithm. In this study, a novel bio-inspired metaheuristic optimization algorithm called artificial algae algorithm (AAA) inspired by the living behaviors of microalgae, photosynthetic species, is introduced. The algorithm is based on evolutionary process, adaptation process and the movement of microalgae. The performance of the algorithm has been verified on various benchmark functions and a real-world design optimization problem. The CEC'05 function set was employed as benchmark functions and the test results were compared with the algorithms of Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Bee Algorithm (BA), Differential Evolution (DE), Ant Colony Optimization for continuous domain (ACOR) and Harmony Search (HSPOP). The pressure vessel design optimization problem, which is one of the widely used optimization problems, was used as a sample real-world design optimization problem to test the algorithm. In order to compare the results on the mentioned problem, the methods including ABC and Standard PSO (SPSO2011) were used. Mean, best, standard deviation values and convergence curves were employed for the analyses of performance. Furthermore, mean square error (MSE), root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), which are computed as a result of using the errors of algorithms on functions, were used for the general performance comparison. AAA produced successful and balanced results over different dimensions of the benchmark functions. It is a consistent algorithm having balanced search qualifications. Because of the contribution of adaptation and evolutionary process, semi-random selection employed while choosing the source of light in order to avoid local minima, and balancing of helical movement methods each other. Moreover, in tested real-world application AAA produced consistent results and it is a stable algorithm.

A research survey: review of AI solution strategies of job shop scheduling problem

Abstract: This paper focus on artificial intelligence approaches to NP-hard job shop scheduling (JSS) problem In the literature successful approaches of artificial intelligence techniques such as neural network, genetic algorithm, multi agent systems, simulating annealing, bee colony optimization, ant colony optimization, particle swarm algorithm, etc are presented as solution approaches to job shop scheduling problem These studies are surveyed and their successes are listed in this article

Improved Metaheuristic Based on the R2 Indicator for Many-Objective Optimization

Abstract: In recent years, performance indicators were introduced as a selection mechanism in multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). A very attractive option is the R2 indicator due to its low computational cost and weak-Pareto compatibility. This indicator requires a set of utility functions, which map each objective to a single value. However, not all the utility functions available in the literature scale properly for more than four objectives and the diversity of the approximation sets is sensitive to the choice of the reference points during normalization. In this paper, we present an improved version of a MOEA based on the $R2$ indicator, which takes into account these two key aspects, using the achievement scalarizing function and statistical information about the population's proximity to the true Pareto optimal front. Moreover, we present a comparative study with respect to some other emerging approaches, such as NSGA-III (based on Pareto dominance), Δp-DDE (based on the Δp indicator) and some other MOEAs based on the R2 indicator, using the DTLZ and WFG test problems. Experimental results indicate that our approach outperforms the original algorithm as well as the other MOEAs in the majority of the test instances, making it a suitable alternative for solving many-objective optimization problems.