Sobol Mutated Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper presents a new mutation operator called the Sobol Mutation (SOM) operator for enhancing the performance of Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization (QPSO) algorithm. The SOM operator unlike most of its contemporary mutation operators do not use the random probability distribution for perturbing the swarm population, but uses a quasi random Sobol sequence to find new solution vectors in the search domain. The proposed version is called Sobol Mutation for quantum inspired PSO (SOM-QPSO) and its comparison is made with Basic Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO), QPSO and some other variants of QPSO. The empirical results show that SOM operator significantly improves the performance of QPSO.