Particle Swarm Optimization with Adaptive Bounds. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a stochastic optimization approach that originated from early attempts to simulate the behavior of birds looking for food. Estimation of distributions algorithms (EDAs) are a class of evolutionary algorithms that build and maintain a probabilistic model capturing the search space characteristics and continuously use this model to generate new individuals. In this work, we propose a new PSO and EDA hybrid algorithm that uses the particles' distribution in the search space in order to adjust the search space bounds, hence, restricting the particles movement as well as their allowable maximum velocity. The algorithms is augmented with a mechanism to overcome premature convergence and escape local minima. The algorithm is compared to the standard PSO algorithm using a suite of well-known benchmark optimization functions. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a promising performance.