Implementing Particle Swarm Optimization with Aging Leader and Challengers (ALC-PSO)

Abstract

In nature, the organisms have a limited lifespan and they grow older with time. Aging is an essential process which leads to the maintenance of species diversity in environment. Every group of species is lead by a leader. As the lifespan of every organism is limited, at a certain point of its life time, the organism deteriorates and become inefficient to lead its group. In this situation, a new leader is found who can efficiently lead its group. The lifespan of the leader and its leading power is checked, if it is not efficient enough, a new challenger is found to lead the group. This aging mechanism is applied to the stochastic process of Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO), in order to remove the limitations that existed in PSO such as: it gets stuck in local optima and the algorithm converges pre-maturely. When aging leader algorithm is applied to PSO, these limitations are removed in an efficient manner. This paper presents some issues that occur while designing and implementing a variant of PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) i.e. ALC-PSO (PSO with Aging Leader and Challengers) which can highly improve the performance of PSO by applying the process of aging to the members of the swarm , bringing its members to the best position.