Mitigating Metaphors: A Comprehensible Guide to Recent Nature-Inspired Algorithms

In recent years, a plethora of new metaheuristic algorithms have explored different sources of inspiration within the biological and natural worlds. This nature-inspired approach to algorithm design has been widely criticised. A notable issue is the tendency for authors to use terminology that is derived from the domain of inspiration, rather than the broader domains of metaheuristics and optimisation. This makes it difficult to both comprehend how these algorithms work and understand their relationships to other metaheuristics. This paper attempts to address this issue, at least to some extent, by providing accessible descriptions of the most cited nature-inspired algorithms published in the last twenty years. It also discusses commonalities between these algorithms and more classical nature-inspired metaheuristics such as evolutionary algorithms and particle swarm optimisation, and finishes with a discussion of future directions for the field

Distribution based artificial fish swarm in continuous global optimization

Distribution based artificial fish swarm (DbAFS) is a new heuristic for continuous global optimization. Based on the artificial fish swarm paradigm, the new algorithm generates trial points from the Gaussian distribution, where the mean is the midpoint between the current and the target point and the standard deviation is the difference between those two points. A local search procedure is incorporated into the algorithm aiming to improve the quality of the solutions. The performance of the proposed DbAFS is investigated using a set of small bound constrained optimization problems.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

A framework for multi-objective optimisation based on a new self-adaptive particle swarm optimisation algorithm

This paper develops a particle swarm optimisation (PSO) based framework for multi-objective optimisation (MOO). As a part of development, a new PSO method, named self-adaptive PSO (SAPSO), is first proposed. Since the convergence of SAPSO determines the quality of the obtained Pareto front, this paper analytically investigates the convergence of SAPSO and provides a parameter selection principle that guarantees the convergence. Leveraging the proposed SAPSO, this paper then designs a SAPSO-based MOO framework, named SAMOPSO. To gain a well-distributed Pareto front, we also design an external repository that keeps the non-dominated solutions. Next, a circular sorting method, which is integrated with the elitist-preserving approach, is designed to update the external repository in the developed MOO framework. The performance of the SAMOPSO framework is validated through 12 benchmark test functions and a real-word MOO problem. For rigorous validation, the performance of the proposed framework is compared with those of four well-known MOO algorithms. The simulation results confirm that the proposed SAMOPSO outperforms its contenders with respect to the quality of the Pareto front over the majority of the studied cases. The non-parametric comparison results reveal that the proposed method is significantly better than the four algorithms compared at the confidence level of 90% over the 12 test functions

A Comprehensive Survey on Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm and Its Applications

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a heuristic global optimization method, proposed originally by Kennedy and Eberhart in 1995. It is now one of the most commonly used optimization techniques. This survey presented a comprehensive investigation of PSO. On one hand, we provided advances with PSO, including its modifications (including quantum-behaved PSO, bare-bones PSO, chaotic PSO, and fuzzy PSO), population topology (as fully connected, von Neumann, ring, star, random, etc.), hybridization (with genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, Tabu search, artificial immune system, ant colony algorithm, artificial bee colony, differential evolution, harmonic search, and biogeography-based optimization), extensions (to multiobjective, constrained, discrete, and binary optimization), theoretical analysis (parameter selection and tuning, and convergence analysis), and parallel implementation (in multicore, multiprocessor, GPU, and cloud computing forms). On the other hand, we offered a survey on applications of PSO to the following eight fields: electrical and electronic engineering, automation control systems, communication theory, operations research, mechanical engineering, fuel and energy, medicine, chemistry, and biology. It is hoped that this survey would be beneficial for the researchers studying PSO algorithms

The Application of PSO in Structural Damage Detection: An Analysis of the Previously Released Publications (2005–2020)

The structural health monitoring (SHM) approach plays a key role not only in structural engineering but also in other various engineering disciplines by evaluating the safety and performance monitoring of the structures. The structural damage detection methods could be regarded as the core of SHM strategies. That is because the early detection of the damages and measures to be taken to repair and replace the damaged members with healthy ones could lead to economic advantages and would prevent human disasters. The optimization-based methods are one of the most popular techniques for damage detection. Using these methods, an objective function is minimized by an optimization algorithm during an iterative procedure. The performance of optimization algorithms has a significant impact on the accuracy of damage identification methodology. Hence, a wide variety of algorithms are employed to address optimization-based damage detection problems. Among different algorithms, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach has been of the most popular ones. PSO was initially proposed by Kennedy and Eberhart in 1995, and different variants were developed to improve its performance. This work investigates the objectives, methodologies, and results obtained by over 50 studies (2005-2020) in the context of the structural damage detection using PSO and its variants. Then, several important open research questions are highlighted. The paper also provides insights on the frequently used methodologies based on PSO, the computational time, and the accuracy of the existing methodologies