Multi-swarm parallel PSO: Hardware implementation

The ever increasing popularity of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is recently attracting attention to the embedded computing world. Although PSO is considered efficient compared to other contemporary population based optimization techniques, for many continuous multimodal and multidimensional problems, it still suffers from performance loss when it is targeted onto embedded application platforms. Examples of such target applications include small mobile robots and distributed sensor nodes in sensor network applications. In a previous work we presented a novel, modular, efficient and portable hardware architecture to accelerate the performance of the PSO for embedded applications. This paper extends the work by presenting a parallelization technique for further speedup of the PSO algorithm by dividing the swarm into a set of subswarms that are executing in parallel. The underlying communication topology and messaging protocols are described. Finally, the performance of the proposed system is evaluated on mathematical and real-world benchmark functions.