Physical Theory for Particle Swarm Optimization

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. A macroscopic study of the PSO is conducted by formulating a diffusion model for the swarm environment. The Einstein’s diffusion equation is solved for the corresponding probability density function (pdf) of the particles trajectory. The diffusion model for the classical PSO is used, in conjunction with Schrödinger’s equation for the quantum PSO, to propose a generalized version of the PSO algorithm based on the theory of Markov chains. This unifies the two versions of the PSO, classical and quantum, by eliminating the velocity and introducing position-only update equations based on the probability law of the method.