UCPSO: A Uniform Initialized Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm with Cosine Inertia Weight

The particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) is a meta-heuristic algorithm with swarm intelligence. It has the advantages of easy implementation, high convergence accuracy, and fast convergence speed. However, PSO suffers from falling into a local optimum or premature convergence, and a better performance of PSO is desired. Some methods adopt improvements in PSO parameters, particle initialization, or topological structure to enhance the global search ability and performance of PSO. These methods contribute to solving the problems above. Inspired by them, this paper proposes a variant of PSO with competitive performance called UCPSO. UCPSO combines three effective improvements: a cosine inertia weight, uniform initialization, and a rank-based strategy. The cosine inertia weight is an inertia weight in the form of a variable-period cosine function. It adopts a multistage strategy to balance exploration and exploitation. Uniform initialization can prevent the aggregation of initial particles. It distributes initial particles uniformly to avoid being trapped in a local optimum. A rank-based strategy is employed to adjust an individual particle’s inertia weight. It enhances the swarm’s capabilities of exploration and exploitation at the same time. Comparative experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the three improvements. Experiments show that the UCPSO improvements can effectively improve global search ability and performance