Can one have a Variable Length Chromosome for Particle Swarm Optimization?

Question

Can the particles have different lengths. For instance some have 10 genes and others have 20?

And if so, how would one go about updating the velocity since the global beast, local best and current could all be of different length?

Answer 1

It seems like you are looking for a solution with multiple swarms.

You can run a few optimizations for each number of "genes" you want to use.

Another option would be to add a variable holding the number of additional "genes" to the decision vector,and communicate only between particles that have that number equal. Then one needs a way to communicate between the swarms, and possibly ability for particles to join other of the swarms.

I refer to a paper by Niu et al. 2006 - "MCPSO: A multi-swarm cooperative particle swarm optimizer".

Hope that helps. Cheers!