Cooperative quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization with dynamic varying search areas and Lévy flight disturbance

This paper proposes a novel variant of cooperative quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (CQPSO) algorithm with two mechanisms to reduce the search space and avoid the stagnation, called CQPSO-DVSA-LFD. One mechanism is called Dynamic Varying Search Area (DVSA), which takes charge of limiting the ranges of particles' activity into a reduced area. On the other hand, in order to escape the local optima, Lévy flights are used to generate the stochastic disturbance in the movement of particles. To test the performance of CQPSO-DVSA-LFD, numerical experiments are conducted to compare the proposed algorithm with different variants of PSO. According to the experimental results, the proposed method performs better than other variants of PSO on both benchmark test functions and the combinatorial optimization issue, that is, the job-shop scheduling problem.