Application of Dynamic Mutated Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm to Design Water Distribution Networks

This paper proposes the application of a new version of the heuristic particle swarm optimization (PSO) method for designing water distribution networks (WDNs). The optimization problem of looped water distribution networks is recognized as an NP-hard combinatorial problem which cannot be easily solved using traditional mathematical optimization techniques. In this paper, the concept of dynamic swarm size is considered in an attempt to increase the convergence speed of the original PSO algorithm. In this strategy, the size of the swarm is dynamically changed according to the iteration number of the algorithm. Furthermore, a novel mutation approach is introduced to increase the diversification property of the PSO and to help the algorithm to avoid trapping in local optima. The new version of the PSO algorithm is called dynamic mutated particle swarm optimization (DMPSO). The proposed DMPSO is then applied to solve WDN design problems. Finally, two illustrative examples are used for comparison to verify the efficiency of the proposed DMPSO as compared to other intelligent algorithms.