An improved particle swarm optimizer for mechanical design optimization problems

This paper presents an improved particle swarm optimizer (PSO) for solving mechanical design optimization problems involving problem-specific constraints and mixed variables such as integer, discrete and continuous variables. A constraint handling method called the ‘fly-back mechanism’ is introduced to maintain a feasible population. The standard PSO algorithm is also extended to handle mixed variables using a simple scheme. Five benchmark problems commonly used in the literature of engineering optimization and nonlinear programming are successfully solved by the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm is easy to implement, and the results and the convergence performance of the proposed algorithm are better than other techniques.