16,769 research outputs found

    A population-based optimization method using Newton fractal

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    Department of Mathematical SciencesMetaheuristic is a general procedure to draw an agreement in a group based on the decision making of each individual beyond heuristic. For last decade, there have been many attempts to develop metaheuristic methods based on swarm intelligence to solve global optimization such as particle swarm optimizer, ant colony optimizer, firefly optimizer. These methods are mostly stochastic and independent on specific problems. Since metaheuristic methods based on swarm intelligence require no central coordination (or minimal, if any), they are especially well-applicable to those problems which have distributed or parallel structures. Each individual follows few simple rules, keeping the searching cost at a decent level. Despite its simplicity, the methods often yield a fast approximation in good precision, compared to conventional methods. Exploration and exploitation are two important features that we need to consider to find a global optimum in a high dimensional domain, especially when prior information is not given. Exploration is to investigate the unknown space without using the information from history to find undiscovered optimum. Exploitation is to trace the neighborhood of the current best to improve it using the information from history. Because these two concepts are at opposite ends of spectrum, the tradeoff significantly affects the performance at the limited cost of search. In this work, we develop a chaos-based metaheuristic method, ???Newton Particle Optimization(NPO)???, to solve global optimization problems. The method is based on the Newton method which is a well-established mathematical root-finding procedure. It actively utilizes the chaotic nature of the Newton method to place a proper balance between exploration and exploitation. While most current population-based methods adopt stochastic effects to maximize exploration, they often suffer from weak exploitation. In addition, stochastic methods generally show poor reproducing ability and premature convergence. It has been argued that an alternative approach using chaos may mitigate such disadvantages. The unpredictability of chaos is correspondent with the randomness of stochastic methods. Chaos-based methods are deterministic and therefore easy to reproduce the results with less memory. It has been shown that chaos avoids local optimum better than stochastic methods and buffers the premature convergence issue. Newton method is deterministic but shows chaotic movements near the roots. It is such complexity that enables the particles to search the space for global optimization. We initialize the particle???s position randomly at first and choose the ???leading particles??? to attract other particles near them. We can make a polynomial function whose roots are those leading particles, called ???a guiding function???. Then we update the positions of particles using the guiding function by Newton method. Since the roots are not updated by Newton method, the leading particles survive after update. For diverse movements of particles, we use modified newton method, which has a coefficient mm in the variation of movements for each particle. Efficiency in local search is closely related to the value of m which determines the convergence rate of the Newton method. We can control the balance between exploration and exploitation by choice of leading particles. It is interesting that selection of excellent particles as leading particles not always results in the best result. Including mediocre particles in the roots of guiding function maintains the diversity of particles in position. Though diversity seems to be inefficient at first, those particles contribute to the exploration for global search finally. We study the conditions for the convergence of NPO. NPO enjoys the well-established analysis of the Newton method. This contrasts with other ???nature-inspired??? algorithms which have often been criticized for lack of rigorous mathematical ground. We compare the results of NPO with those of two popular metaheuristic methods, particle swarm optimizer(PSO) and firefly optimizer(FO). Though it has been shown that there are no such algorithms superior to all problems by no free lunch theorem, that is why the researchers are concerned about adaptable global optimizer for specific problems. NPO shows good performance to CEC 2013 competition test problems comparing to PSO and FO.ope

    Efficiency Analysis of Swarm Intelligence and Randomization Techniques

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    Swarm intelligence has becoming a powerful technique in solving design and scheduling tasks. Metaheuristic algorithms are an integrated part of this paradigm, and particle swarm optimization is often viewed as an important landmark. The outstanding performance and efficiency of swarm-based algorithms inspired many new developments, though mathematical understanding of metaheuristics remains partly a mystery. In contrast to the classic deterministic algorithms, metaheuristics such as PSO always use some form of randomness, and such randomization now employs various techniques. This paper intends to review and analyze some of the convergence and efficiency associated with metaheuristics such as firefly algorithm, random walks, and L\'evy flights. We will discuss how these techniques are used and their implications for further research.Comment: 10 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1212.0220, arXiv:1208.0527, arXiv:1003.146

    Optimal control of many-body quantum dynamics: chaos and complexity

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    Achieving full control of the time-evolution of a many-body quantum system is currently a major goal in physics. In this work we investigate the different ways in which the controllability of a quantum system can be influenced by its complexity, or even its chaotic properties. By using optimal control theory, we are able to derive the control fields necessary to drive various physical processes in a spin chain. Then, we study the spectral properties of such fields and how they relate to different aspects of the system complexity. We find that the spectral bandwidth of the fields is, quite generally, independent of the system dimension. Conversely, the spectral complexity of such fields does increase with the number of particles. Nevertheless, we find that the regular o chaotic nature of the system does not affect signficantly its controllability.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure
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