Development of a Flower Pollination Algorithm toolkit in LabVIEW™

Abstract

Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA) is one of the latest evolutionary algorithms (EAs) inspired by the natural process of pollination of flowers. This Paper addresses the development of FPA toolkit in LabVIEW™, a versatile platform provided by National Instruments for test, measurement and control applications. It may be noted that LabVIEW™ has provided only one EA based optimization technique which is Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm named as Global Optimization.vi in its standard package. Since, several new and efficient techniques are available for optimization there is always a need to implement the best optimization technique in LabVIEW™ environment for the benefit of measurement and control engineers. The developed FPA toolkit has been tested on several benchmark test functions and its comparison is also carried out with the standard DE toolkit. Based on the investigations, it has been inferred that FPA toolkit results are better than DE toolkit in terms of convergence rate particularly for higher dimensional optimization problems.