A fast restarting particle swarm optimizer

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a swarm intelligence technique that optimizes a problem by iterative exploration and exploitation in the search space. However, PSO cannot achieve the preservation of population diversity on solving multimodal optimization problems, and once the swarm falls into local convergence, it cannot jump out of the local trap. In order to solve this problem, this paper presents a fast restarting particle swarm optimization (FRPSO), which uses a novel restarting strategy based on a discrete finite-time particle swarm optimization (DFPSO). Taking advantage of frequently speeding up the swarm to converge along with a greater exploitation capability and then jumping out of the trap, this algorithm can preserve population diversity and provide a superior solution. The experiment performs on twenty-five benchmark functions which consists of single-model, multimodal and hybrid composition problems, the experimental result demonstrates that the performance of the proposed FRPSO algorithm is better than the other three representatives of the advanced PSO algorithm on most of these functions.