The influence of fitness landscape characteristics on particle swarm optimisers.

In the growing field of swarm-based metaheuristics, it is widely agreed that the behaviour of an algorithm, in terms of a good balance of exploration and exploitation, plays an important part in its success. Despite this, the influence that the characteristics of an optimisation problem may have on the behaviour of an algorithm is largely ignored. The characteristics of an optimisation problem can be intuitively understood and quantified in terms of fitness landscapes characteristics (FLCs). Similarly, the behaviour of a swarm-based algorithm can be quantified in terms of its diversity rate-of-change (DRoC). This study investigates correlations between the FLCs of optimisation problems and the DRoCs of particle swarm optimisers. The result is a collection of findings about links between particular problem characteristics and algorithm behaviour. The approach followed in this study may also be used as a template for further studies that broaden the scope of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]