Solving tri-level programming problems using a particle swarm optimization algorithm

Tri-level programming, a special case of multilevel programming, arises to deal with decentralized decision-making problems that feature interacting decision entities distributed throughout three hierarchical levels. As tri-level programming problems are strongly NP-hard and the existing solution approaches lack universality in solving such problems, the purpose of this study is to propose an intelligence-based heuristic algorithm to solve tri-level programming problems involving linear and nonlinear versions. In this paper, we first propose a general tri-level programming problem and discuss related theoretical properties. A particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is then developed to solve the tri-level programming problem. Lastly, a numerical example is adopted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed PSO algorithm.