Quadratic Surrogate Attractor for Particle Swarm Optimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a particle swarm optimization method that uses a quadratic surrogate model to improve convergence and robustness, outperforming standard algorithms on diverse benchmark functions.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel quadratic surrogate attractor for PSO that enhances convergence behavior and robustness with minimal computational overhead.

Findings

Quadratic surrogate attractor outperforms standard PSO on benchmark functions.

Significant improvements observed for quasi-convex functions.

Method demonstrates robustness against noise and premature convergence.

Abstract

This paper presents a particle swarm optimization algorithm that leverages surrogate modeling to replace the conventional global best solution with the minimum of an n-dimensional quadratic form, providing a better-conditioned dynamic attractor for the swarm. This refined convergence target, informed by the local landscape, enhances global convergence behavior and increases robustness against premature convergence and noise, while incurring only minimal computational overhead. The surrogate-augmented approach is evaluated against the standard algorithm through a numerical study on a set of benchmark optimization functions that exhibit diverse landscapes. To ensure statistical significance, 400 independent runs are conducted for each function and algorithm, and the results are analyzed based on their statistical characteristics and corresponding distributions. The quadratic surrogate attractor consistently outperforms the conventional algorithm across all tested functions. The improvement is particularly pronounced for quasi-convex functions, where the surrogate model can exploit the underlying convex-like structure of the landscape.