Study on the compression-expansion coefficient in drift particle swarm optimization

This paper introduces a variant of particle swarm optimization algorithm called the drift particle swarm optimization (DPSO), which is inspired by the free electron model in an external electric field at finite temperature. As the compression-expansion coefficient in DPSO is an important parameter which can greatly influence the performance of the algorithm, three types of control strategies are proposed to control this parameter. The performance of these strategies on the DPSO is comprehensively evaluated on eight benchmark functions. From the experimental results and statistical tests, guidelines about selecting the control method for the compression-expansion coefficient are given.