An Entropy-Assisted Particle Swarm Optimizer for Large-Scale Optimization Problem

Diversity maintenance is crucial for particle swarm optimizer’s (PSO) performance. However, the update mechanism for particles in the conventional PSO is poor in the performance of diversity maintenance, which usually results in a premature convergence or a stagnation of exploration in the searching space. To help particle swarm optimization enhance the ability in diversity maintenance, many works have proposed to adjust the distances among particles. However, such operators will result in a situation where the diversity maintenance and fitness evaluation are conducted in the same distance-based space. Therefore, it also brings a new challenge in trade-off between convergence speed and diversity preserving. In this paper, a novel PSO is proposed that employs competitive strategy and entropy measurement to manage convergence operator and diversity maintenance respectively. The proposed algorithm was applied to the large-scale optimization benchmark suite on CEC 2013 and the results demonstrate the proposed algorithm is feasible and competitive to address large scale optimization problems.