On Self-Regulated Swarms, Societal Memory, Speed and Dynamics

Wasps, bees, ants and termites all make effective use of their environment and resources by displaying collective “swarm” intelligence. Termite colonies – for instance – build nests with a complexity far beyond the comprehension of the individual termite, while ant colonies dynamically allocate labor to various vital tasks such as foraging or defense without any … Read more

On Ants, Bacteria and Dynamic Environments

Wasps, bees, ants and termites all make effective use of their environment and resources by displaying collective “swarm” intelligence. Termite colonies – for instance – build nests with a complexity far beyond the comprehension of the individual termite, while ant colonies dynamically allocate labor to various vital tasks such as foraging or defense without any … Read more

Societal Implicit Memory and his Speed on Tracking Extrema over Dynamic Environments using Self-Regulatory Swarms

In order to overcome difficult dynamic optimization and environment extrema tracking problems, we propose a Self-Regulated Swarm (SRS) algorithm which hybridizes the advantageous characteristics of Swarm Intelligence as the emergence of a societal environmental memory or cognitive map via collective pheromone laying in the landscape (properly balancing the exploration/exploitation nature of the search strategy), with … Read more

Disk Packing in a Square: A New Global Optimization Approach

We present a new computational approach to the problem of placing $n$ identical non overlapping disks in the unit square in such a way that their radius is maximized. The problem has been studied in a large number of papers, both from a theoretical and from a computational point of view. In this paper we … Read more

SOS approximation of polynomials nonnegative on a real algebraic set

Let $V\subset R^n$ be a real algebraic set described by finitely many polynomials equations $g_j(x)=0,j\in J$, and let $f$ be a real polynomial, nonnegative on $V$. We show that for every $\epsilon>0$, there exist nonnegative scalars $\{\lambda_j\}_{j\in J}$ such that, for all $r$ sufficiently large, $f+\epsilon\theta_r+\sum_{j\in J} \lambda_j g_j^2$ is a sum of squares. Here, … Read more

A sum of squares approximation of nonnegative polynomials

We show that every real nonnegative polynomial $f$ can be approximated as closely as desired (in the $l_1$-norm of its coefficient vector) by a sequence of polynomials $\{f_\epsilon\}$ that are sums of squares. The novelty is that each $f_\epsilon$ has a simple and explicit form in terms of $f$ and $\epsilon$. CitationSIAM J. Optimization 16 … Read more

Simulated Entropy and Global Optimization

Nonlinear optimization deals with the problem of optimizing a single objective function, such as physical weight or cost, in the presence of equality and inequality constraints. Usually engineering design applications are highly non-linear and engineers are always interested in not finding a feasible design that is locally optimal in the design space, but globally optimal … Read more

DIRECT algorithm : A new definition of potentially optimal hyperrectangles

We propose a new version of potentially optimal intervals for the DIRECT algorithm. A two-points based sampling method is presented. The method starts from a distingished point (the peak point) by forming an initial triangle. The idea is to sample the midpoint of a specific interval: the basis of the resulting triangle. This specific interval … Read more

A new class of test functions for global optimization

In this paper we propose a new class of test functions for unconstrained global optimization problems for which, however, it is a priori known that the global minimum lies in the interior of a sphere centered at the origin. The class depends on some parameters through which the difficulty of the test problems can be … Read more

Efficient and cheap bounds for (standard) quadratic optimization

A standard quadratic optimization problem (StQP) consists in minimizing a quadratic form over a simplex. A number of problems can be transformed into a StQP, including the general quadratic problem over a polytope and the maximum clique problem in a graph. In this paper we present several polynomial-time bounds for StQP ranging from very simple … Read more