The fl exi-PSO: Towards a more fl exible particle swarm optimizer

This paper presents some simple heuristics to increase fl exibility in particle swarms. The particle velocities are updated with an extended inertia weight formulation, particles are also allowed to act as hill-climbers and the population is divided into exploration particles which are allowed to roam the search space more freely and exploitation particles which try to improve the fi tness by fi ne tuning a local search, thus making the swarm much more fl exible in its behavior. These heuristics improve the traditional inertia weight PSO and show comparable performance in the computational results of benchmark functions to other state of the art techniques. The benchmark functions used are a rigorous test bed for evaluating any optimization algorithm. An introduction and general overview of approaches to particle swarm optimizers is fi rst presented, followed by a discussion of the proposed method. The result of the experiments is then discussed followed by proposals for future research directions. © Operational Research Society of India.