Niching with Sub-swarm Based Particle Swarm Optimization

In this study, we present a sub-swarm based particle swarm optimization algorithm for niching (NSPSO). The NSPSO algorithm is capable of locating and maintaining a sufficient number of niches throughout the execution of the algorithm. The niches which are identified are then exploited by using a sub-swarm strategy which tries to refine the niche and converge to an optimum solution. NSPSO is capable of locating multiple solutions and is well suited for multimodal optimization problems. From the experimentation results, we have observed that NSPSO is quite efficient in locating both global and local optima. We present a comparison of the performance of NSPSO with NichePSO and SPSO.