Application of quorum sensing to PSO and MOPSO for convergence promotion

One of the most important features of the PSO algorithm is its fast convergence. This is a positive feature as long as there's no premature convergence. Inspired by the phenomenon of quorum sensing behavior in the bacteria, we incorporate this bio-behavior into PSO and MOPSO to maintain the swarm diversity and promote global exploration when the velocity of each particle in the swarm is rather small. The effectiveness of applying quorum sensing to PSO and MOPSO has been tested on a set of benchmark functions and compared with representative algorithms. Simulation results illustrate that application of quorum sensing to PSO and MOPSO enables to promote their convergence, the proposed algorithms with introduction of quorum sensing mechanism are rather competitive and could be used as effective global optimization tools.