Engineering Optimization with Hybrid Particle Swarm and Ant Colony Optimization

This article presents a heuristic particle swarm ant colony optimization algorithm to solveengineering optimization problems. Although PSO has simple principle and ease to beimplemented and can eventually locate the desired solution, however, its practical use insolving engineering optimization problems is severely limited by the high computationalcost of the slow convergence rate. Here, ant colony and harmony search principles areemployed to speed up local search and improve precision of the solutions. A modifiedfeasible-based mechanism is described which handles the problem-specific constraints.Benchmark optimization problems are used to illustrate the reliability of the proposedalgorithm.