TPPSO: A Novel Two-Phase Particle Swarm Optimization

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a stout and rapid searching algorithm that has been used in various applications. Nevertheless, its major drawback is the stagnation problem that arises in the later phases of the search process. To solve this problem, a proper balance between investigation and manipulation throughout the search process should be maintained. This article proposes a new PSO variant named two-phases PSO (TPPSO). The concept of TPPSO is to split the search process into two phases. The first phase performs the original PSO operations with linearly decreasing inertia weight, and its objective is to focus on exploration. The second phase focuses on exploitation by generating two random positions in each iteration that are close to the global best position. The two generated positions are compared with the global best position sequentially. If a generated position performs better than the global best position, then it replaces the global best position. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, sixteen popular unimodal, multimodal, shifted, and rotated benchmarking functions have been used to compare its performance with other existing well-known PSO variants and non-PSO algorithms. Simulation results show that TPPSO outperforms the other modified and hybrid PSO variants regarding solution quality, convergence speed, and robustness. The convergence speed of TPPSO is extremely fast, making it a suitable optimizer for real-world optimization problems

Improved load balancing for LTE-A heterogeneous networks using particle swarm optimization

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are a promising means of meeting the requirements of Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) in terms of data traffic, coverage and capacity. In HetNets, power disparities arise between base stations in different tiers. The use of existing user association schemes will lead to load imbalances between these base stations, thus affecting network performance. Biased user association has been widely studied to improve load balancing in HetNets. Static biasing has been the focus of most existing work but this approach does not yield optimized performance because the optimal biasing values vary with user location. In this paper, we investigate the use of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to conduct dynamic user association by finding the optimal bias values. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves better load balancing performance in terms of the network balance index compared to a baseline scheme

Particle Swarm Optimization: A Comprehensive Survey

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is one of the most well-regarded swarm-based algorithms in the literature. Although the original PSO has shown good optimization performance, it still severely suffers from premature convergence. As a result, many researchers have been modifying it resulting in a large number of PSO variants with either slightly or significantly better performance. Mainly, the standard PSO has been modified by four main strategies: modification of the PSO controlling parameters, hybridizing PSO with other well-known meta-heuristic algorithms such as genetic algorithm (GA) and differential evolution (DE), cooperation and multi-swarm techniques. This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive review of PSO, including the basic concepts of PSO, binary PSO, neighborhood topologies in PSO, recent and historical PSO variants, remarkable engineering applications of PSO, and its drawbacks. Moreover, this paper reviews recent studies that utilize PSO to solve feature selection problems. Finally, eight potential research directions that can help researchers further enhance the performance of PSO are provided