Comparative Study On Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization Decomposition Methods for Large-scale Optimization

Abstract

The vast majority of real-world optimization problems can be put into the class of large-scale global optimization (LSOP). Over the past few years, an abundance of cooperative coevolutionary (CC) algorithms has been proposed to combat the challenges of LSOP’s. When CC algorithms attempt to address large scale problems, the effects of interconnected variables, known as variable dependencies, causes extreme performance degradation. Literature has extensively reviewed approaches to decomposing problems with variable dependencies connected during optimization, many times with a wide range of base optimizers used. In this thesis, we use the cooperative particle swarm optimization (CPSO) algorithm as the base optimizer and perform an extensive scalability study with a range of decomposition methods to determine ideal divide-and-conquer approaches when using a CPSO. Experimental results demonstrate that a variety of dynamic regrouping of variables, seen in the merging CPSO (MCPSO) and decomposition CPSO (DCPSO), as well varying total fitness evaluations per dimension, resulted in high-quality solutions when compared to six state-of-the-art decomposition approaches.