Solving Constrained Nonlinear Optimization Problems with Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper presents a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm for constrained nonlinear optimization problems. In PSO, the potential solutions, called particles, are "flown" through the problem space by learning from the current optimal particle and its own memory. In this paper, preserving feasibility strategy is employed to deal with constraints. PSO is started with a group of feasible solutions and a feasibility function is used to check if the new explored solutions satisfy all the constraints. All particles keep only those feasible solutions in their memory. Eleven test cases were tested and showed that PSO is an efficient and general solution to solve most nonlinear optimization problems with nonlinear inequality constraints.