Particle Swarm Optimiser with Neighbourhood Operator
P.N.Suganthan
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Queensland St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia,
Email : suganocsee.uq. edu.au
Abstract In recent years population based meth-
ods such as genetic algorithms, evolutionary pro-
gramming, evolution strategies and genetic pro-
gramming have been increasingly employed to
solve a variety of optimisation problems. Re-
cently, another novel population based optimi-
sation algorithm - namely the particle swarm op-
timisation ( P S O ) algorithm, was introduced by
Eberhart and Kennedy [3,7]. Although the P S O
algorithm possesses some attractive properties,
its solution quality has been somewhat inferior
to other evolutionary optimisation algorithms [2].
In this paper, we propose a number of techniques
to improve the standard P S O algorithm. Simi-
lar techniques have been employed in the context
of self-organising maps and neural-gas networks
[9,111.
1 Introduction
In recent years population based methods such as genetic
algorithms [5], evolutionary programming [4], evolution
strategies [la] and genetic programming [lo] have been
increasingly employed t o solve a variety of optimisation
problems. These multiple solutions based stochastic al-
gorithms are less likely t o get trapped in local minima
t,han single solution based methods such as the steep-
est descent algorithm. Due t o this advantage, numerous
problerns have been formulated in order t o be solved by
evolutionary algorithms.
Recently, another novel population based optimisa-
tion algorithm - namely the particle swarm optimisa-
tion (PSO) algorithm, was introduced by Eberhart and
Kennedy [3,7]. T h e underlying motivation for t,he devel-
opment of PSO algorithm was social behaviour of ani-
mals such as bird flocking, fish schooling, animal herd-
ing and swarming theory. T h e PSO algorithm possesses
some attractive properties such as memory, (i.e. every
particle remembers its best solution), the initial popula-
0-7803-5536-9/99/$10.00 0 1999 IEEE
tion is maintained through out (i.e. it is not necessary
to apply operators such as recombination, selection, etc.
t o the population) and constructive cooperation between
particles.
Recent studies by Angeline [2] showed t h a t although
PSO discovered reasonable quality solutions much faster
than other evolutionary algorithms, it did not possess
the ability t o perform a fine grain search t o improve upon
the quality of the solutions as the number of generations
was increased. Whereas other evolutionary algorithms
almost always continued t o improve the quality of the
solutions as the number of generations was increased and
in the end generated much better solutions than those
generated by the PSO algorithm.
In this paper, we propose a number of improvements
for the standard PSO algorithm. Similar techniques have
been used widely in the context of the self-organising
maps [9] and neural-gas networks [ll]. We introduce
a variable neighbourhood operator. During the initial
stages of the optimisation, the PSO algorithm’s neigh-
bourhood will be an individual particle itself. As the
number of generations increases, the neighbourhood will
be gradually extended t o include all particles. In other
words, the variable GBEST in the PSO algorithm is re-
placed by LBEST (i.e. local best solution) where a local
neighbourhood size is gradually increased. In addition,
the magnitudes of the random walk and inertia weight in
the PSO are also gradually adjusted in order t o perform
a fine grain search during the final stages of optimisa-
tion. We study function optimisation t o illustrate the
performance of the modified PSO algorithm.
In the next section, we will present our modified PSO
algorithm. In Section 3, we explain the test problem -
namely the function optimisation. Experimental proce-
dures are described in Section 4. T h e paper is concluded
in Section 5.
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2 Modified Particle Swarm Opti-
mization Algorithm
Table 1: T h e Original PSO Algorithm
PSO1: Initialise positions and associated velocity of all
particles (potential solutions) in t,he population
randomly in the D dimension space.
P S 0 2 : Evaluate the fittness value of all particles.
P S 0 3 : Compare the PBESTU of every particle with
its current fitness value. If the current fitness value is
better, then assign t h e current fitness value t o
PBESTU and assign the current coordinates t o
P B E S T z n [d] coordinat,es.
P S 0 4 : Det,errnine the current best fitness value in the
whole population and its coordinates. If t,he current.
best fitness value is better than the G B E S T , then
assign the current best, fitness value t o G B E S T and
assign the current coordinates t o G B E S T z [ [ d ]
coordinates.
P S 0 5 : Change velocities using t8hefollowing equation:
where C1 = Cz = 2.0
+
P S 0 6 : Move each particle t o Presentzn[d] w [ [ d ]
P S 0 7 : Repeat steps PSO2-PSO6 until a stop crkerion
is satisfied O R a prespecified number of iterat,ions is
completed.
As we indicated before, the PSO algorithm is very
similar t,o other evolutionary algorithms, in t h a t the al-
gorit,hm is randomly initialised with a potential solution
population. In the PSO method, each particle (or po-
tential solution) is assigned with a random velocity and
flown through the solution parameter space. Each po-
tential solution retains the coordinates and the best fit-
ness value associated with the best solution t h a t particle
achieved so far. This solution is referred t o as PBEST,
i.e. the personal best solution. T h e PSO algorithm also
maintains the coordinates and the value of the best so-
lution achieved by the whole populat.ion. This solution
is known as GBEST, i.e. the global best, solution. In
our irnplement,ation, we require the best solution within
a neighbourhood. This solution is called LBEST solu-
tion. This solution can be discovered by inspecting all
P B E S T solutions wit,hin the neighbourhood. T h e orig-
inal PSO algorithm is summarised in the table below.
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It is obvious from equation ( l ) ,t h a t we accelerate ev-
ery particle in a direction between its personal best and
the global best. It was also observed t h a t committing
too early in the search to the global best found so far is
more likely t o confine the search around a local minima,
because the global best found early in the search may
well be a poor local minima. Some effort [6,13]has been
made t o consider a local best solution instead of either
P B E S T or G B E S T . In this paper, we propose t o re-
place the G B E S T component by a local best ( L B E S T )
solution. We dynamically increase t h e neighbourhood in
order t o change the L B E S T from P B E S T t o G B E S T
with increasing number of iterations. T h e neighbour-
hood may be defined in two different ways. T h e simplest
and fastest method is t o consider particles just above
and below a specific particle for which a neighbourhood
is sought, as in [6]. Alternatively, we could calculate
distances between particles and choose a fraction of par-
t,icles t h a t are close t o the particle for which a neighbour-
hood is sought. This fraction can be increased gradually
t o include all particles during final stages of search pro-
cess. This method can be computational intensive, if the
dimension of the parameter space is large. We investi-
gate both alternatives.
Table 2: T h e Modified PSO Algorithm
PSO1: Initialise positions and associated velocity of a
number of particles (potential solution) randomly.
PSO2: Evaluate the fitness value of all particles.
P S 0 3 : Compare the P B E S T [ ]of every particle with
its current fitness value. If the current fitness value is
better, then assign the current fitness value t o
PBESTO and assign the current coordinates to
P B E S T z [ [ d ]coordinates.
P S 0 4 : For every particle define a neighbourhood and
determine t8helocal best fitness value and its
coordinates for every particle.
P S 0 5 : Change velocities using the following equation:
4lPl = W ( t )* 4 l [ d l +
C , ( t )* r a n d ( ) l * ( P B E S T z [ ] [ d-] Presentz[][d])+
C,(t) * r a n d 0 2 * ( L B E S T z [ l [ d -] Presentz[][d])(2)
P S 0 6 : Move each particle t o PresentzU[d] ~ [ [ d ] +
P S 0 7 : Change parameter values using t h e following
equation:
W(2) = W“ + (WO - W“)[l - t / K ] (3)
Cl(2) = c y + (CY - C,”)[l - t / K ] (4)
C,(t) = C,- + (C,”- C7)[1- t / K ] (5)
where K and t are total number of
iterations/generations and current iteration/generation
number. Superscripts cm and 0 denotes parameter
values at the start and in the end of search process.
PS08: Repeat steps PSO2-PSO7 until a stop criterion
is satisfied O R a prespecified number of iterations is
completed.
In addition, we introduced time decay t o weight val-
ues in equation (1). In the original algorithm, W, C1 and
Cz all are assigned with fixed values through out the
search process. In our investigations, we attempted t o
decay the values of these paramet,ers, so t h a t the par-
ticles make very large movement,s in the early stages,
t,hereby scanning the whole parameter space for good lo-
cal minima and then in the final stages particles perform
a fine grain search. However, our experiments indicated
t,hat fixed values for C1 and Cz generated bett'er solu-
t,ions, though not necessarily 2 for both parameters as
shown in equation ( 1 ) . In Table 2 , we summarise the
modified PSO algorithm.
3 Function Optimisation
In our study, we employed the modified PSO algorithm
t o perform function optimisation. T h e test functions
t,hat we use are commonly used in the evolutionary com-
putation literature [a]. We considered four functions -
two of which are unimodal and t,he other two have a
number of local minima. All functions are designed t o
have minima at or near the origin. T h e first function is
t,he sphere rnodel given by
n particle in the population. We then obtain a ratio us-
.fl(.) = x: (6)
i=l
where x is a real-valued vector of dimension n and zi is
the ith element of the vector. Although it is a unimodal
function, it differentiates well between good local opti-
misers and poor local optimisers. T h e second function is
the Rosenbrock function given by
T h e third function is t h e generalised Rastrigrin function
given by the following equation.
n
h(2)= C(z?
- locOs(2Tzi) + 10) (8)
i=l
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T h e fourth function is the generalised Griewank function
expressed as follows.
n
1 "
These functions have been used by several evolutionary
computation researchers [ l ] .
4 Experimental Results
In our experiments, 20, 30 and 50 dimensions are consid-
ered. In all cases, 40 particles are used. Maximum num-
ber of iterations is fixed at 1000. We had 50 trial runs for
evpry instance of t,hese problems. W ( t ) was adapted as
follows: Winitial = 0.95, Wjinal = 0.2 weight adaptation:
W(t) = (Winilia, - 0.2)* ( M A X I T E R ?- ITER.) 0.2 +
Likewise, parameters C1 and Cz are also initially set t o
3 and gradually decreased t o 0.25. However, varying C1
and Cz lowered the quality of the solution. Hence, we
kept them fixed at 2.0.
T h e standard algorithm provided by Dr Yuhui Shi and
my modified algorithm were run using t h e above parame-
ter values. In my modified algorithm, the G B E S T com-
ponent in the update equation was replaced by L B E S T
component. T h e L B E S T was gradually incremented t o
become the G B E S T . T h e neighbourhood operator used
t o obtain the L B E S T is explained below.
T h e L B E S T is defined to be the best solution within
a neighbourhood of a particle t o be updated. In or-
der t o define a neighbourhood, we calculate distances
between the candidate particle (to be adapted) and all
other particles. We also obtain the m a x i m u m distance
(rnaz-dist) between the candidatmeparticle and any other
ing these distances as follows: dist[l]/rnaz-dist for ev-
ery particle 1 in the population. We also defined a
fract,ion as a function of iteration ( I T E R ) as follows:
*
frac = (3 .O * IT ER+ 0.6 M A X IT E R )/ M A X IT ER. If
frac (fraction) is less than 0.9, we search for the LBEST
solution among particles which satisfy the following con-
dition: frac > d i s t [ l ] / r n a z d i s t . If t h e frac is less t h a n
0.9, we use the G B E S T in the update equation. T h e
results are summarised in Table 3.
In table 3, the first value is the worst result. T h e
second value is the aggregate error for 50 runs. We can
observe t h a t the aggregate error is often better for the
modified algorithm. T h e worst error is marginally worse
for the modified algorithm. Further investigations are
necessary, particularly along t h e directions detailed be-
low.
 My experiments also showed t h a t C1 and Cz had t o
be constants t o generate good quality solutions, but not
necessarily a value of 2.0 for both parameters gave the
best result. For instance, C1 = 2.5, C2 = 1.5 gave an
aggregate error of 0.391 for function 4. This result is
better than those reported above. On the other hand
C1 = 0.0, C2 = 2.5 gave an aggregate error of near zero
for function 2. Hence, it would be interesting t o develop
an algorithm (genetic based?) t o search for the best
combination of parameters for the PSO for every problem
separately. Further, the computation of frac can also
be adjusted in an efficient manner by replacing 3.0 and
0.6 factors by problem specific variables obtained by an
efficient search algorithm.
5 Conclusions
In this paper, we investigated the PSO algorithm. In
particular, we proposed a number of improvements such
as gradually increasing local neighbourhood, time vary-
ing random walk and inertia weight values and two al-
ternative schemes for determining the L E EST solution
for every particle. Our experimental results showed some
advantages of using a neighbourhood operator. We found
t h a t the time varying values for C1 and C;!did not in fact
perform worse than the system with fixed values. How-
ever, we found out t h a t there existed different combina-
tion of values for C1 and C2 (not just 2.0) t o yield good
solutions for different problems. We are currently inves-
tigating the means t o determine these values efficiently
for different problems.
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 Table 3: Function optimisation results

function I dimension I standard algo. modified algo.

20 0 0
0 0
fl 30 0.000006 0.000005
0.000043 0.000034
50 0.8929 0.953
9.162 8.80
20 0.0108 0.0244
0.02891 0.0318
f2 30 0.189051 0.00552
0.2125 0.0194
50 0.1669 0.1611
0.5635 0.4104
20 51.74 49.26
1516.1 1443.7
f3 30 106.59 109.45
3506.85 3447.99
50 383.0 431.4
11745.3 11557.5
20 0.1104 0.1399
1.705 1.48
f4 30 0.0615 0.0659
0.662 0.5778
50 0.0528 0.0615
0.783 0.7614

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