Fuzzy PSO: a generalization of particle swarm optimization

In standard particle swarm optimization (PSO), the best particle in each neighborhood exerts its influence over other particles in the neighborhood. In this paper, we propose fuzzy PSO, a generalization which differs from standard PSO in the following respect: charisma is defined to be a fuzzy variable, and more than one particle in each neighborhood can have a non-zero degree of charisma, and, consequently, is allowed to influence others to a degree that depends on its charisma. We evaluate our model on the weighted maximum satisfiability (maxsat) problem, comparing performance to standard PSO and to Walk-Sat.