Pareto Improving Selection of the Global Best in Particle Swarm Optimization

Particle Swarm Optimization is an effective stochastic optimization technique that simulates a swarm of particles that fly through a problem space. In the process of searching the problem space for a solution, the individual variables of a candidate solution will often take on inferior values characterized as “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back.” Several approaches to solving this problem have introduced varying notions of cooperation and competition. Instead we characterize the success of these multi-swarm techniques as reconciling conflicting information through a mechanism that makes successive candidates Pareto improvements. We use this analysis to construct a variation of PSO that applies this mechanism to gbest selection. Experiments show that this algorithm performs better than the standard gbest PSO algorithm.