Black-hole PSO and SNO for electromagnetic optimization

In the past years Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) has gained increasing attention for engineering and real-world applications. Among these, the design of antennas and electromagnetic devices is a well-established field of application. More recently, Social Network Optimization (SNO) has been introduced, inspired by the recent explosion of social networks and their capability to drive people's decision making process in everyday life. “Black-hole” is a novel operator, which is here considered for both PSO and SNO. It is based on the concept of repulsion among agents when they get stuck in local optima. The design of a planar array antenna is here addressed in order to assess its performances on a benchmark EM optimization problem. Reported results show its effectiveness in dealing with antenna optimization.