A Time-varying Velocity Control Strategy for Balancing Exploration and Exploitation Behaviour of a Binary PSO

Combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) are NP-hard, and their solution space is discrete, which poses a significant challenge for optimization algorithms. Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) is wel-known optimization technique that has been widely applied in various type of COPs. However, one of the challenges in BPSO is to balance exploration and exploitation to locate the optimal solution. This paper presents a Time-varying Velocity Control (TVC) strategy to balance exploration and exploitation in a BPSO. The TVC strategy utilizes a time-varying control parameter to adjust the velocity of the particles, allowing for more exploration in the early phases of the optimization process and more exploitation as the search progresses. The proposed strategy is evaluated on a set of benchmark combinatorial optimization problems, and the results demonstrate that it outperforms other commonly used BPSO strategies in terms of both efficiency and solution quality. Furthermore, the TVC strategy is shown to be robust to changes in the problem landscape, making it a promising approach that can be used for solving a wide range of combinatorial optimization problems.