Impact of Communication Topology on PSO-based Swarms in Vector Fields

This paper studies the role of communication topologies in swarms performing the search under strong negative influence coming from the unknown external environment affecting the individuals' movements. The experiments are carried out on two modified versions of PSO, namely Power- and Zigzag-PSO, which act without any preliminary information about external forces modeled by vector fields. We propose four dynamic topologies inspired by the game-theoretic concepts and investigate their performance relative to the ordinarily static ones with regard to convergence and “energy expenses”, reflecting the amount of collective effort needed to eliminate the produced drift. The results reveal that the topology of social connections on its own is not an effective way to cope with the unknown disturbance during the search. However, within the predefined coping mechanism against the disturbance as in the case of Zigzag-PSO, the considered dynamic topologies show the advantage before static ones for a limited communication radius, indicating its potential in swarm robotics applications.