Feasibility enhanced particle swarm optimization for constrained mechanical design problems

Constrained optimization problems constitute an important fraction of optimization problems in the mechanical engineering domain. It is not uncommon for these problems to be highly-constrained where a specialized approach that aims to improve constraint satisfaction level of the whole population as well as finding the optimum is deemed useful especially when the objective functions are very costly. A new algorithm called Feasibility Enhanced Particle Swarm Optimization (FEPSO), which treats feasible and infeasible particles differently, is introduced. Infeasible particles in FEPSO do not need to evaluate objective functions and fly only based on social attraction depending on a single violated constraint, called the activated constraint, which is selected at each iteration based on constraint priorities and flight occurs only along dimensions of the search space to which the activated constraint is sensitive. To ensure progressive improvement of constraint satisfaction, particles are not allowed to violate a satisfied constraint in FEPSO. The highly-constrained four-stage gear train problem and its two variants introduced in this paper are used to assess the effectiveness of FEPSO. The results suggest that FEPSO is effective and consistent in obtaining feasible points, finding good solutions, and improving the constraint satisfaction level of the swarm as a whole.