Micro Evolutionary Particle Swarm Optimization (MEPSO): A new modified metaheuristic

Abstract

This work introduces the algorithm Micro Evolutionary Particle Swarm Optimization (MEPSO), which is based on the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO). MEPSO’s main idea is to replace PSO’s update of velocity with evolutionary mutations and crossovers that occur probabilistically. MEPSO uses two control hyperparameters of the evolutionary operators, α and β, to improve convergence ability. These hyperparameters allow the algorithm to adapt to different problems. MEPSO algorithm has a crucial feature: the use of micropopulations. This results in reduced computational complexity, faster convergence rate, prevention of premature convergence, and easy implementation. The proposed approach provides the basis for further study of MEPSO’s suitability for dynamic and multiobjective optimization. We evaluated MEPSO and PSO against 14 chosen benchmark functions. PSO’s results revealed that it had an average success rate of 84% and a median computation time of 49.9 s. MEPSO, on the other hand, had a success rate of 81% and a computation time of 8 s. We found MEPSO to be faster when we performed a right-tail Wilcoxon Signed-Rank statistical test against the Mean Computation Time of 30 runs for each function for each algorithm.

Keywords

• Swarm intelligence
• Modified particle swarm optimization algorithm
• Evolutionary computing