Dynamic multi-swarm particle swarm optimizer using parallel PC cluster systems for global optimization of large-scale multimodal functions

This article presents a novel parallel multi-swarm optimization (PMSO) algorithm with the aim of enhancing the search ability of standard single-swarm PSOs for global optimization of very large-scale multimodal functions. Different from the existing multi-swarm structures, the multiple swarms work in parallel, and the search space is partitioned evenly and dynamically assigned in a weighted manner via the roulette wheel selection (RWS) mechanism. This parallel, distributed framework of the PMSO algorithm is developed based on a master-slave paradigm, which is implemented on a cluster of PCs using message passing interface (MPI) for information interchange among swarms. The PMSO algorithm handles multiple swarms simultaneously and each swarm performs PSO operations of its own independently. In particular, one swarm is designated for global search and the others are for local search. The first part of the experimental comparison is made among the PMSO, standard PSO, and two state-of-the-art algorithms (CTSS and CLPSO) in terms of various un-rotated and rotated benchmark functions taken from the literature. In the second part, the proposed multi-swarm algorithm is tested on large-scale multimodal benchmark functions up to 300 dimensions. The results of the PMSO algorithm show great promise in solving high-dimensional problems.