Molecular dynamics formulation of the particle swarm optimization method

We propose an inter-disciplinary approach to particle swarm optimization (PSO) by establishing a molecular dynamics (MD) formulation of the algorithm, leading to a physical theory for the swarm environment. The physical theory provides new insights on the operational mechanism of the PSO method. In particular, a thermodynamic analysis, which is based on the MD formulation, is introduced to provide deeper understanding of the convergence behavior of the basic classical PSO algorithm. The thermodynamic theory is used to propose a new acceleration technique for the PSO. This technique is applied to the problem of synthesis of linear array antennas and very good improvement in the convergence performance is observed.