Improved Barebones Particle Swarm Optimization with Neighborhood Search and Its Application on Ship Design

Barebones particle swarm optimization (BPSO) is a new PSO variant, which has shown a good performance on many optimization problems. However, similar to the standard PSO, BPSO also suffers from premature convergence when solving complex optimization problems. In order to improve the performance of BPSO, this paper proposes a new BPSO variant called BPSO with neighborhood search (NSBPSO) to achieve a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation during the search process. Experiments are conducted on twelve benchmark functions and a real-world problem of ship design. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the standard PSO, BPSO, and six other improved PSO algorithms.