A comparative study of Modified Particle Swarm Optimization, Differential Evolution and Artificial Bees Colony optimization in synthesis of circular array

Abstract

This paper describes a method of synthesis of uniform circular array with optimized spacing using three recent search heuristics: Modified Particle Swarm Optimization (MPSO), Differential Evolution (DE) and Artificial Bees Colony (ABC) algorithms. The objective of the work is to generate a pencil beam with minimum Side Lobe Level (SLL) and maximum possible Directivity for fixed half power beam width (HPBW). Excitation of individual array elements is computed using the algorithms. Dynamic Range Ratio (DRR) of current amplitude distribution does not exceed a prefixed threshold value. Phase of the individual excitation is fixed at zero degree. Simulation results show considerable enhancements in array performances using the global optimizers. The paper finally illustrates a comparative evaluation of the three proposed algorithms regarding their applicability as numerical optimization techniques.