Exploring Extended Particle Swarms: A Genetic Programming Approach

Sw arm Optimisation (PSO) uses a population of particles that fly over the fitness landscape in search of an optimal solution. The particles are controlled by forces that encourage each particle to fly back both tow ards the best point sampled by it and tow ards the sw arm's best point, w ile its momentum tries to keep it moving in its current direction. Previous research started exploring the possibility of evolving the force generating equationsw hich control the particles through the use of genetic programming (GP). We independently verify the findings of the previous research and then extend it by considering additional meaningful ingredients for the PSO force-generating equations, such as global measures of dispersion and position of the sw arm. We show that, on a range of problems, GP can automatically generate new PSO algorithms that outperform standard human-generated asw ell as some previously evolved ones