Exploring Potential Barrier Estimation Mechanism Based on Quantum Dynamics Framework

Abstract

Due to the probability characteristics of quantum mechanism, the combination of quantum mechanism and intelligent algorithm has received wide attention. Quantum dynamics theory uses the Schrödinger equation as a quantum dynamics equation. Through three approximation of the objective function, quantum dynamics framework (QDF) is obtained which describes basic iterative operations of optimization algorithms. Based on QDF, this paper proposes a potential barrier estimation (PBE) method which originates from quantum mechanism. With the proposed method, the particle can accept inferior solutions during the sampling process according to a probability which is subject to the quantum tunneling effect, to improve the global search capacity of optimization algorithms. The effectiveness of the proposed method in the ability of escaping local minima was thoroughly investigated through double well function (DWF), and experiments on two benchmark functions sets show that this method significantly improves the optimization performance of high dimensional complex functions. The PBE method is quantized and easily transplanted to other algorithms to achieve high performance in the future.