Binary Particle Swarm Optimization with Bit Change Mutation

Particle swarm optimization (PSO), inspired by social psychology principles and evolutionary computations, has been successfully applied to a wide range of continuous optimization problems. However, research on discrete problems has been done not much even though discrete binary version of PSO (BPSO) was introduced by Kennedy and Eberhart in 1997. In this paper, we propose a modified BPSO algorithm, which escapes from a local optimum by employing a bit change mutation. The proposed algorithm was tested on De jong's suite and its results show that BPSO with the proposed mutation outperforms the original BPSO.