A Novel Diversity Guided Galactic Swarm Optimization With Feedback Mechanism

Galactic Swarm Optimization (GSO) is an optimization method inspired by the movements of stars and star clusters in the galaxy. This method aims to find the best solution in two phases using other known optimization methods. The first phase explores the search space, while the second phase tries to refine the best solution. In GSO, the population of the best individuals obtained from the first phase is used as the initial population for the second phase. This process is repeated until the stopping criterion is met. Although the knowledge obtained from the first phase is transferred to the second phase in GSO, there is no knowledge transfer from the second phase to the first phase. In this study, we propose a modification where the knowledge obtained in the second phase is transferred back to the first phase. Additionally, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method, used as the search method in the original study, has a fast convergence problem, which hinders an effective discovery process in the first phase of GSO. To address this, the proposed diversity-guided modification regulates population diversity and enhances exploration. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, twenty-six traditional benchmark functions and three engineering design problems were used. The proposed method was compared with the original GSO and six current optimization methods. The results of the experimental study were analyzed using statistical tests. The experimental results and analyses show that the proposed method performs successfully.