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Abstract: Back analysis is commonly used in identifying geomechanical parameters based on the monitored displacements. Conventional back analysis method is not capable of recognizing non-linear relationship involving displacements and mechanical parameters effectively. The new intelligent displacement back analysis method proposed in this paper is the combination of support vector machine, particle swarm optimization, and numerical analysis techniques. The non-linear relationship is efficiently represented by support vector machine. Numerical analysis is used to create training and testing samples for recognition of SVMs. Then, a global optimum search on the obtained SVMs by particle swarm optimization can lead to the geomechanical parameters identification effectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Particle swarm optimization is a novel swarm-intelligence-based algorithm and a valid optimization technique. However, the algorithm suffers from the premature convergence problem when facing to complex optimization problem. In order to keep the balance between the global exploration and the local exploitation validly, the paper develops a knowledge-based cooperative particle swarm optimization (KCPSO). KCPSO mainly simulates the self-cognitive and self-learning process of evolutionary agents in special environment, and introduces a knowledge billboard to record varieties of search information. Moreover, KCPSO takes advantage of multi-swarm to maintain the swarm diversity and tries to guide their evolution by the shared information. Under the guide of the shared information, KCPSO manipulates each sub-swarm to go on with local exploitation in different local area, in which every particle follows a social learning behavior mode; at the same time, KCPSO carries out the global exploration through the escaping behavior and the cooperative behavior of the particles in different sub-swarms. KCPSO can maintain appropriate swarm diversity and alleviate the premature convergence validly. The proposed model was applied to some well-known benchmarks. The relative experimental results show KCPSO is a robust global optimization method for the complex multimodal functions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

How to manage trade-off between exploitation and exploration in Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for efficiently solving various optimization problems is an important issue. In order to prevent premature convergence in PSO search, this paper proposes a new method, Particle Swarm Optimization with Diversive Curiosity (PSO/DC). A key idea of the proposed method is to introduce a mechanism of diversive curiosity into PSO for preventing premature convergence and for managing the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Diversive curiosity is represented by an internal indicator that detects marginal improvement of a swarm of particles for certain number of iterations, and forces them to continually explore an optimal solution to a given optimization problem. Applications of the proposed method to a 2-dimensional optimization problem well demonstrate its effectiveness. Our experimental results indicate that the performance (100%) by the proposed method is superior in terms of success ratio to that (60%) by the PSO model optimized by EPSO, and basically accord with the finding called "the zone of curiosity" in psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]