A modified brain storm optimization

Brain storm optimization (BSO) is a new kind of swarm intelligence algorithm inspired by human creative problem solving process. Human being is the most intelligent organism in the world and the brainstorming process popularly used by them has been demonstrated to be a significant and promising way to create great ideas for problem solving. BSO transplants the brainstorming process in human being into optimization algorithm design and gains successes. BSO generally uses the grouping, replacing, and creating operators to produce ideas as many as possible to approach the problem global optimum generation by generation. In this paper, we propose two novel designs to enhance the conventional BSO performance. The first design of the modified BSO (MBSO) is that it uses a simple grouping method (SGM) in the grouping operator instead of the clustering method to reduce the algorithm computational burden. The second design is that MBSO uses a novel idea difference strategy (IDS) in the creating operator instead of the Gaussian random strategy. The IDS not only contains open minded element to avoid the ideas being trapped by local optima, but also can match the search environment to create better new ideas for problem solving. Experiments have been conducted to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the MBSO algorithm. Moreover, the contributions of SGM and IDS are investigated to show how and why MBSO can perform better than BSO.