Fundamental of Particle Swarm

Optimization
Classes of Optimization Techniques
Swarm Intelligence

“The emergent collective intelligence of groups

of simple agents.”
(Bonabeau et al, 1999)
Characteristics of Swarms
 Composed of many individuals
 Individuals are homogeneous
 Local interaction based on simple rules
 Self-organization ( No centralized Control)
 Introduction to the PSO: Origins
 Inspired from the nature social behavior and dynamic
movements with communications of insects, birds and fish
 Introduction to the PSO: Origins
 In 1986, Craig Reynolds described this process in 3 simple
behaviors:

Separation Alignment Cohesion

avoid crowding local move towards the average move toward the average
flockmates heading of local flockmates position of local flockmates
 Introduction to the PSO: Origins

 Application to optimization: Particle Swarm Optimization

 Proposed by James Kennedy & Russell Eberhart (1995)

 Combines self-experiences with social experiences

 Introduction to the PSO: Concept
 Uses a number of agents (particles) that
constitute a swarm moving around in
the search space looking for the best
solution

 Each particle in search space adjusts its

“flying” according to its own flying
experience as well as the flying
experience of other particles
 Introduction to the PSO: Concept
 Inspired by social behavior of bird flocking
and fish schooling
 So what is the best strategy to locate the
food?
 Suppose a group of birds is searching food in
an area
 Only one piece of food is available
 Birds do not have any knowledge about the
location of the food
 But they know how far the food is from their
present location
 The best strategy is to follow the bird nearest
to the food
Introduction to the PSO: Concept

 A flying bird has a position and a velocity at any time

 In search of food, the bird changes his position by adjusting
the velocity
 The velocity changes based on his past experience and also
the feedbacks received from his neighbor
 Introduction to the PSO: Concept
 Each solution is considered as bird, called particle
 All the particles have a fitness value. The fitness values can be
calculated using objective function
 All the particles preserve their individual best performance
 They also know the best performance of their group
 They adjust their velocity considering their best performance and
also considering the best performance of the best particle
 Introduction to the PSO: Concept
 Collection of flying particles (swarm) - Changing solutions
 Search area - Possible solutions
 Movement towards a promising area to get the global optimum
 Each particle keeps track:
• its best solution, personal best, pbest

• the best value of any particle, global best, gbest

 Introduction to the PSO: Concept
 Each particle adjusts its travelling speed dynamically
corresponding to the flying experiences of itself and its
colleagues
 Each particle modifies its position according to:
• its current position
• its current velocity

• the distance between its current position and pbest

• the distance between its current position and gbest

Introduction to the PSO: Concept
My best
perf.
pi
Here I The best
am! x perf. of my
pg
neighbours

v
Initialization. Positions and velocities
Random
position
Regular
position
Velocity
 Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm -
Neighborhood
• It's also common to see PSO
geographical
algorithms using population
topologies, or "neighborhoods",
which can be smaller, localized
subsets of the global best value.

• Although some variants use a

“geographical” neighbourhood, that
is to say compute distances and social
take the nearest particles, the most
widely used neighbourhood is a
“social” one: just a list of
neighbours, regardless where they
are.
 Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm -
Neighborhood
• Usually, in practice, social
neighbourhoods are defined just
once, at the very beginning, which
is consistent with the principle
“simple rules for simple agents”.

• The use of neighborhoods often

help the algorithm to avoid getting
stuck in local minima.
global
Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm
Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm -
Example
Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm -
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Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm -
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Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm -
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Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm -
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Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm -
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Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm -
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Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm -
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 Introduction to the PSO: Algorithm
Characteristics
 Advantages
• Insensitive to scaling of design variables
• Simple implementation
• Easily parallelized for concurrent processing
• Very few algorithm parameters
• Very efficient global search algorithm

 Disadvantages
• Tendency to a fast and premature convergence in mid optimum points
• Slow convergence in refined search stage (weak local search ability)
The Particle Swarm
Optimization