Niching ability of basic particle swarm optimization algorithms

Niching algorithms have the ability to locate and maintain more than one solution to a multi-modal optimization problem. Recently, niching algorithms have been developed for particle swarm optimization (PSO) to locate multiple optima. This paper investigates the ability of the basic PSO to locate and maintain niches, in order to arrive at a conclusion on whether special purpose PSO algorithms, like NichePSO, need to be developed at all. The main finding is that, due to the social component of the velocity update, the gbest PSO is incapable of niching, while the lbest PSO is inefficient in this task.