Multi-Leader Comprehensive Learning Particle Swarm Optimization with Adaptive Mutation for Economic Load Dispatch Problems

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is one of the most popular, nature inspired optimization algorithms. The canonical PSO is easy to implement and converges fast, however, it suffers from premature convergence. The comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization (CLPSO) can achieve high exploration while it converges relatively slowly on unimodal problems. To enhance the exploitation of CLPSO without significantly impairing its exploration, a multi-leader (ML) strategy is combined with CLPSO. In ML strategy, a group of top ranked particles act as the leaders to guide the motion of the whole swarm. Each particle is randomly assigned with an individual leader and the leader is refreshed dynamically during the optimization process. To activate the stagnated particles, an adaptive mutation (AM) strategy is introduced. Combining the ML and the AM strategies with CLPSO simultaneously, the resultant algorithm is referred to as multi-leader comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization with adaptive mutation (ML-CLPSO-AM). To evaluate the performance of ML-CLPSO-AM, the CEC2017 test suite was employed. The test results indicate that ML-CLPSO-AM performs better than ten popular PSO variants and six other types of representative evolutionary algorithms and meta-heuristics. To validate the effectiveness of ML-CLPSO-AM in real-life applications, ML-CLPSO-AM was applied to economic load dispatch (ELD) problems.