A Novel Particle Swarm Optimization with Improved Learning Strategies and Its Application to Vehicle Path Planning

In order to balance the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the PSO algorithm to enhance its robustness, this paper presents a novel particle swarm optimization with improved learning strategies (ILSPSO). Firstly, the proposed ILSPSO algorithm uses a self-learning strategy, whereby each particle stochastically learns from any better particles in the current personal history best position (pbest), and the self-learning strategy is adjusted by an empirical formula which expresses the relation between the learning probability and evolution iteration number. The cognitive learning part is improved by the self-learning strategy, and the optimal individual is reserved to ensure the convergence speed. Meanwhile, based on the multilearning strategy, the global best position (gbest) of particles is replaced with randomly chosen from the top k of gbest and further improve the population diversity to prevent premature convergence. This strategy improves the social learning part and enhances the global exploration capability of the proposed ILSPSO algorithm. Then, the performance of the ILSPSO algorithm is compared with five representative PSO variants in the experiments. The test results on benchmark functions demonstrate that the proposed ILSPSO algorithm achieves significantly better overall performance and outperforms other tested PSO variants. Finally, the ILSPSO algorithm shows satisfactory performance in vehicle path planning and has a good result on the planned path.