Adaptive particle swarm optimization with variable relocation for dynamic optimization problems

This paper proposes to solve the dynamic optimization problem (DOP) by using an adaptive particle swarm optimization (APSO) algorithm with an variable relocation strategy (VRS). The VRS based APSO algorithm (APSO/VRS) has the following two advantages when solving DOP. Firstly, by using the APSO optimizing framework, the algorithm benefits from the fast optimization speed due to the adaptive parameter control. More importantly, the adaptive parameter and operator in APSO make the algorithm fast respond to the environment changes of DOP. Secondly, VRS was reported in the literature to help dynamic evolutionary algorithm (DEA) to relocate the individual position in promising region when environment changes. Therefore, the modified VRS used in APSO can collect historical information in the stability stage and use such information to guide the particle variable relocation in the change stage. We evaluated both APSO and APSO/VRS on several dynamic benchmark problems and compared with two state-of-the-art DEAs and DEA that also used the VRS. The results show that both APSO and APSO/VRS can obtain very competitive results on these problems, and APSO/VRS outperforms others on most of the test cases.