Normalization group brain storm optimization for power electronic circuit optimization

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel normalization group strategy (NGS) to extend brain storm optimization (BSO) for power electronic circuit (PEC) design and optimization. As different variables in different dimensions of the PEC represent different circuit components such as resistor, capacitor, or inductor, they have different physical significances and various search space that are even not in comparable range. Therefore, the traditional group method used in BSO, which is based on the solution position information, is not suitable when solving PEC. In order to overcome this issue, the NGS proposed in this paper normalizes different dimensions of the solution to the same comparable range. This way, the grouping operator of BSO can work when using BSO to solve PEC. The NGS based BSO (NGBSO) approach has been implemented to optimize the design of a buck regulator in PEC. The results are compared with those obtained by using genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). Results show that the NGBSO algorithm outperforms GA and PSO in our PEC design and optimization study. Moreover, the NGS can be regarded as an efficient method to extend BSO to real-world application problems whose dimensions are with different physical significances and search ranges.