Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 904815, 24 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/904815
Research Article

A Multiswarm Optimizer for Distributed Decision Making in Virtual Enterprise Risk Management

Yichuan Shao,1,2 Xingjia Yao,2 Liwei Tian,3 and Hanning Chen4

1College of Information Science and Engineering, Shenyang University, Shenyang 110044, China
2School of New Energy Engineering, Shenyang University of Technology, Shenyang 110036, China
3Science and Technology Agency, Shenyang University, Shenyang 110036, China
4Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China

Received 27 October 2011; Accepted 16 February 2012

Academic Editor: Leonid Shaikhet

Copyright © 2012 Yichuan Shao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We develop an optimization model for risk management in a virtual enterprise environment based on a novel multiswarm particle swarm optimizer called PS2O. The main idea of PS2O is to extend the single population PSO to the interacting multiswarms model by constructing hierarchical interaction topology and enhanced dynamical update equations. With the hierarchical interaction topology, a suitable diversity in the whole population can be maintained. At the same time, the enhanced dynamical update rule significantly speeds up the multiswarm to converge to the global optimum. With five mathematical benchmark functions, PS2O is proved to have considerable potential for solving complex optimization problems. PS2O is then applied to risk management in a virtual enterprise environment. Simulation results demonstrate that the PS2O algorithm is more feasible and efficient than the PSO algorithm in solving this real-world problem.