A Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization and Differential Evolution Algorithm with Adaptive Population and Dynamic Parameter Allocation

Abstract

Traditional particle swarm optimization (PSO) easily falls into premature convergence, while differential evolution (DE) is highly sensitive to fixed control parameters. Existing PSO-DE hybrid frameworks suffer from static population sizes and insufficient cross-population information exchange. This paper proposes PSO-DE-ADP, a hybrid optimizer with sinusoidal adaptive parameters, elite-guided mutation, ring neighborhood-weighted PSO and fitness-driven dynamic dual-population allocation. Four complementary mechanisms are integrated: (i) sine-wave perturbation superimposed on linear decay adaptively adjusts PSO inertia weight, acceleration factors and DE scaling/crossover coefficients to balance search stages; (ii) global elite individuals are embedded into DE mutation to reduce blind random search; (iii) ring topology with weighted learning realizes bidirectional information interaction between PSO and DE subpopulations; (iv) the proportion of PSO/DE individuals is dynamically adjusted according to elite ratio to allocate computing resources. Experiments adopt the CEC2017 30-dimensional benchmark with 30 test functions covering unimodal, multimodal, hybrid and composite landscapes. Compared with 8 state-of-the-art metaheuristics, PSO-DE-ADP achieves the lowest Friedman rank (1.08 vs. 2.23–4.90 for PSO variants; 1.53 vs. 2.07–5.00 for non-PSO algorithms). Ablation tests prove each component significantly boosts accuracy; The algorithm only costs 0.172 s average runtime, superior to all competitors. Statistical Wilcoxon and Friedman tests verify its significant superiority. Future work extends this method to multi-objective, constrained and real engineering optimization tasks.