Variants
Numerous variants of even a basic PSO algorithm are possible. For example, there are different ways to initialize the particles and velocities (e.g. start with zero velocities instead), how to dampen the velocity, only update pi and g after the entire swarm has been updated, etc. Some of these choices and their possible performance impact have been discussed in the literature.
New and more sophisticated PSO variants are also continually being introduced in an attempt to improve optimization performance. There are certain trends in that research; one is to make a hybrid optimization method using PSO combined with other optimizers, another research trend is to try and alleviate premature convergence (that is, optimization stagnation) e.g. by reversing or perturbing the movement of the PSO particles, another approach to deal with premature convergence is the use of multiple swarms (multi-swarm optimization), and then there are also attempts at adapting the behavioural parameters of PSO during optimization.
Read more about this topic: Particle Swarm Optimization
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