A Species Conservation-Based Particle Swarm Optimization with Local Search for Dynamic Optimization Problems

In the optimization of problems in dynamic environments, algorithms need to not only find the global optimal solutions in a specific environment but also to continuously track the moving optimal solutions over dynamic environments. To address this requirement, a species conservation-based particle swarm optimization (PSO), combined with a spatial neighbourhood best searching technique, is proposed. This algorithm employs a species conservation technique to save the found optima distributed in the search space, and these saved optima either transferred into the new population or replaced by the better individual within a certain distance in the subsequent evolution. The particles in the population are attracted by its history best and the optimal solution nearby based on the Euclidean distance other than the index-based. An experimental study is conducted based on the moving peaks benchmark to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison with several state-of-the-art algorithms widely used in dynamic optimization problems. The experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm for tracking the moving optima in dynamic environments.