A self-adaptive discrete PSO algorithm with Heterogeneous parameter

Abstract

This paper presents a discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) algorithm with heterogeneous (non-uniform) parameter values for solving the dynamic traveling salesman problem (DTSP). The DTSP can be modeled as a sequence of static sub-problems, each of which is an instance of the TSP. In the proposed DPSO algorithm, the information gathered while solving a sub-problem is retained in the form of a pheromone matrix and used by the algorithm while solving the next sub-problem. We present a method for automatically setting the values of the key DPSO parameters (except for the parameters directly related to the computation time and size of a problem).We show that the diversity of parameters values has a positive effect on the quality of the generated results. Furthermore, the population in the proposed algorithm has a higher level of entropy. We compare the performance of the proposed heterogeneous DPSO with two ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms. The proposed algorithm outperforms the base DPSO and is competitive with the ACO.