Particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) is a global stochastic tool, which has ability to search the global optima. However, PSO algorithm is easily trapped into local optima with low accuracy in convergence. In this paper, in order to overcome the shortcoming of PSO algorithm, an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm (IPSO), based on two forms of exponential inertia weight and two types of centroids, is proposed. By means of comparing the optimization ability of IPSO algorithm with BPSO, EPSO, CPSO, and ACL‐PSO algorithms, experimental results show that the proposed IPSO algorithm is more efficient; it also outperforms other four baseline PSO algorithms in accuracy.

Motivated by concepts in quantum mechanics and particle swarm optimization (PSO), quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) was proposed as a variant of PSO with better global search ability. In this paper, a QPSO with weighted mean personal best position and adaptive local attractor (ALA-QPSO) is proposed to simultaneously enhance the search performance of QPSO and acquire good global optimal ability. In ALA-QPSO, the weighted mean personal best position is obtained by distinguishing the difference of the effect of the particles with different fitness, and the adaptive local attractor is calculated using the sum of squares of deviations of the particles’ fitness values as the coefficient of the linear combination of the particle best known position and the entire swarm’s best known position. The proposed ALA-QPSO algorithm is tested on twelve benchmark functions, and compared with the basic Artificial Bee Colony and the other four QPSO variants. Experimental results show that ALA-QPSO performs better than those compared method in all of the benchmark functions in terms of better global search capability and faster convergence rate.