Urban Maths: Particle Swarm Optimisation

摘要

Have you ever watched a murmuration of starlings? That is, their behaviour just before settling to roost for the night whereby they swarm in apparently coordinated flight, making amazing patterns in the sky (see [ 1 ],for example). It is mesmerising! Shoals of fish often exhibit similar collective behaviour in the sea. I don't know whether the exact mechanism used by the birds and fish to produce this behaviour is known but, perhaps unsurprisingly,it has inspired mathematicians and others to develop search algorithms [2] based loosely on this behaviour. These are known as particle swarm optimisation (PSO) methods.