This paper presents a particle swarm optimizer for solving constrained optimization problems which adopts a very small population size (five particles). The proposed approach uses a reinitialization process for preserving diversity, and does not use a penalty function nor it requires feasible solutions in the initial population. The leader selection scheme adopted is based on the distance of a solution to the feasible region. In addition, a mutation operator is incorporated to improve the exploratory capabilities of the algorithm. The approach is tested with a well-know benchmark commonly adopted to validate constrainthandling approaches for evolutionary algorithms. The results show that the proposed algorithm is competitive with respect to state-of-the-art constraint-handling techniques. The number of fitness function evaluations that the proposed approach requires is almost the same (or lower) than the number required by the techniques of the state-of-the-art in the area.
['Juan Carlos Fuentes Cabrera', 'Carlos A. Coello Coello']
Handling constraints in particle swarm optimization using a small population size