An Improved Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization Based on Cooperative Swarms

The discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) is a kind of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to find optimal solutions for discrete problems. This paper proposes an improved DPSO based on cooperative swarms, which partition the search space into lower dimensional subspaces. The k-means split scheme and regular split scheme are applied to split the solution vector into swarms. Then the swarms optimize the different components of the solution vector cooperatively. Some strategies are further used to improve the accuracy and convergence. Application of the proposed cooperative swarms based DPSO (CDPSO) on the traveling salesman problem (TSP) shows a significant improvement over conventional DPSOs.