Exponential Particle Swarm Optimization for Global Optimization

Nature-inspired metaheuristics have been extensively investigated to solve challenging optimization problems. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is one of the most famous nature-inspired algorithms owing to its simplicity and ability to be used in a wide range of applications. This paper presents an extended PSO variant, namely, Exponential Particle Swarm Optimization (ExPSO). To effectively explore the whole search space, the proposed algorithm divides the swarm population into three equal subpopulations and employs a new search strategy based on an exponential function (permitting particles to make leaps in the search space) and an adapted control of the velocity range of each particle (to balance the exploration and exploitation search phases). The leaping strategy is integrated into the velocity equation and a new linear decreasing cognitive parameter (including a dynamic inertia weight strategy) is integrated into the proposed method. The developed algorithm allows large jumps at the beginning of the search, and then small jumps for further improvements in specific regions of the solution search space. Our variant approach, ExPSO, has been intensively tested through a comparison with eight other well-known heuristic search algorithms, over 29 benchmark problems, and real optimization engineering problems. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test and Friedman rank have been applied to analyze the search performance of the algorithms. The comparisons and statistical results show that the exponential search strategy significantly contributes to the search process and proves the superiority of ExPSO in terms of the convergence velocity and optimization accuracy.