Maintaining population diversity in brain storm optimization algorithm

Swarm intelligence suffers the premature convergence, which happens partially due to the solutions getting clustered together, and not diverging again. The brain storm optimization (BSO), which is a young and promising algorithm in swarm intelligence, is based on the collective behavior of human being, that is, the brainstorming process. Premature convergence also happens in the BSO algorithm. The solutions get clustered after a few iterations, which indicate that the population diversity decreases quickly during the search. A definition of population diversity in BSO algorithm to measure the change of solutions' distribution is proposed in this paper. The algorithm's exploration and exploitation ability can be measured based on the change of population diversity. Two kinds of partial re-initialization strategies are utilized to improve the population diversity in BSO algorithm. The experimental results show that the performance of the BSO is improved by these two strategies.