ANALYSIS OF MUTATION OPERATORS ON QUANTUM-BEHAVED PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM
Wei Hua Fang, Jun Jie Sun, Wenbo Xu · New Mathematics and Natural Computation · 2009
Mutation operator is one of the mechanisms of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) and it can provide diversity in the search and help to explore the undiscovered search place. Quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO), which is inspired by fundamental theory of PSO algorithm and quantum mechanics, is a novel stochastic searching technique and it may encounter local minima problem when solving multi-modal problems just as that in PSO. A novel mutation mechanism is proposed in this paper to enhance the global search ability of QPSO and a set of different mutation operators is introduced and implemented on the QPSO. Experiments are conducted on several well-known benchmark functions. Experimental results show that QPSO with some of the mutation operators is proven to be statistically significant better than the original QPSO.