Enhancing the robustness of a speciation-based PSO

Speciation encourages an evolutionary algorithm to locate multiple solutions in multimodal environments. Speciation algorithms often require a user to specify a parameter to define the species radius, which can be a major drawback since this knowledge may not be available a priori. This paper proposes a technique using a time-based convergence measure to overcome this problem. The proposed method is used to enhance the performance of a speciation-based PSO (SPSO) and has been shown to be robust over a wide range of values for this user-specified parameter.