Multi-swarm surrogate model assisted PSO algorithm to minimize distribution network energy losses

The computational analysis of real-world engineering problems often relies on time-consuming simulation calculations. This presents challenges in balancing computational burden and precision when applying traditional metaheuristic algorithms to large-scale complex problems. While there have been numerous surrogate-assisted metaheuristic optimization algorithms proposed, most of them are designed for solving expensive problems within 30–50 dimensions. In this paper, a novel approach called Parallel-multi-swarm Gaussian Process Regression surrogate-based particle swarm optimization (Parallel-MS-GPRS-PSO) is proposed for high-dimensional problems. This approach combines a standard particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, multi-swarm cooperative PSO (MSCPSO), and a GPR surrogate-based PSO (PSO-GPR). By integrating PSO-GPR and MSCPSO, the proposed method aims to effectively explore and exploit the search space while enhancing the global and local performance of the surrogate model. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, it is compared with several existing PSO algorithms on seven benchmark functions and an engineering problem. The results illustrate that the Parallel-MS-GPRS-PSO approach outperforms the existing algorithms. Moreover, the method shows promising performance in computationally expensive engineering optimization problems with 288 variables.