A taxonomy of cooperative particle swarm optimizers

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a stochastic approach that was originally developed to simulate the behavior of birds and it was successfully applied to many applications. Cooperative PSO models, where multiple swarms are evolving in parallel while sharing information, were introduced in the past few years to efficiently explore the search space. This work brings a comprehensive survey of all the cooperative PSO models proposed in the literature. The work also proposes a definition of what a cooperative PSO model is. A taxonomy for classifying these models is presented. This taxonomy is based on the type of the decomposition achieved by the model. Finally, some directions for future research are identified.