Comparison of Particle Swarm Optimization and

Genetic Algorithm in the Design of Permanent Magnet

Motors
Y. Duan, R.G. Harley and T.G. Habetler
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

Abstract- The complexity of the electric machine structure

makes an optimal design a difficult and challenging task. Particle
Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) are two
popular methods for their advantages such as gradient-free and
ability to find global optima. Due to the fact that the machine
design models are sometimes computationally intense, it is
important for the optimization algorithms used in the design
practice to have high computational efficiency. This paper uses the
design of a Surface Mount Permanent Magnet (SMPM) machine
with an analytical model as a benchmark and compares the
performance of PSO and GA in terms of their accuracy, the
robustness to population size and algorithm coefficients. The
results show that PSO has advantages over GA on those aspects
and is preferred over GA when time is a limiting factor.
Similarities in the machine design problems make the comparison
result also applicable to the design of other types of machines and
with other modeling methods
I. INTRODUCTION
The complexity of the electric machine structure makes an
optimal design a difficult and challenging task. The
nonlinearities in materials and the complex relationships
between many of the geometrical parameters truly make optimal
machine design a multi-objective optimization. Moreover, the
modeling of an electric machine is also challenging [2]. All of
II. ELECTROMAGNETIC TOOLS TO SUPPORT MACHINE
DESIGN
There are currently three broad classes of modeling
approaches used in machine design: the analytical method, the
FEA [2] and the magnetic equivalent circuits (MEC) method
[3]. The FEA and MEC are able to consider the nonlinearities in
the material and generally have higher accuracy, but are
computationally intense [2]. Moreover, a machine prototype
must be designed before FEA or MEC can analyze it. On the
other hand, the analytical design method, which is based on the
physical and mathematical relationships in the machine, is able
to compute machine design parameters according to certain
specifications, thus can generate a design. The analytical design
method is also computationally fast, which provides a good
starting point for finer FEA or MEC based analysis.
For the above reasons, this work uses the SMPM machine
analytical model improved from [1] to design a 15 KW, 1800
rpm, 480 V (line-line), 60 Hz SMPM motor as a benchmark.
Fig. 1 shows the flowchart of this analytical design model.
DiaSGap
Length
Inductance
ThichMag
Tooth Width
AirGap Flux
Stator and Rotor
Yoke Thickness
Density

these render most classic optimization algorithms ineffective [2] Number of

turns per
because the optimization problem needs to be formulated as a phase
nonlinear, non-gradient, constrained minimization problem, Back EMF
which requires a computational intelligence based method, such
as the GA and the more popular PSO. Output
Power
The electrical machine design model has to relate the
geometric and materials’ data to the performance, and such a Current
model usually contains a large number of input variables. The
Current
computation of the model itself is therefore time-consuming, Desnity
especially when a Finite Element Method (FEA) is used. This Slot Fill Factor

underlines the importance of investigating and comparing the

Design
PSO and GA in terms of their computational efficiency. This Parameters
paper considers the design of a SMPM motor with an analytical
design model based on [1], as an example, and does a
comprehensive comparison against using a GA or PSO Loss Weigth Volume
technique. The result is also informative for other types of motor
Figure 1: Flowchart of the SMPM analytical design model
and other modeling techniques.

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There are only three free design variables in this analytical
design model: the stator inner diameter at the airgap
side(DiaSGap), the machine axial length (Length), and the
magnet thickness (MagThck). The stator slot fill factor, the
stator current density, the output power and the excitation
voltage are set as constraints. Given the values of the three
design variables and constraints, other design parameters can be
solved, such as the stator turns per phase, the slot width, etc.
This analytical design model is nonlinear and contains both
continuous and discrete variables, which makes the traditional
gradient based optimization method, such as Newton’s method
[8], ineffective. However, the computational based method,
such as PSO and GA, are good candidates in solving such
optimization problems with complicated system model. PSO
and GA are both applied for this machine design optimization
problem and their performances are compared.
III. IMPLEMENTATION OF PSO AND GA
A. Objective Function
To account for various requirements in the PM motor design,
the objective functions used here have five performance
indexes, namely: volume (m3), weight (kg), efficiency, weight
of the magnets (kg) and the torque per ampere at the rated
condition (Nm/Arms). Weighting factors have two purposes: the
first purpose is normalizing each term to be in approximately the
same magnitude range, the second is putting emphasis on each
index to represent how much importance is attached to each
index. One example of such an objective function that pays
roughly equal attention to each of the performance indexes is
defined as follows:
output = Volume *10000 + Weight + (1 − Efficiency) *200
(1)
+ WtMagnet *12 − TperA *10
B. Particle Swarm Optimization[4]
PSO is an evolutionary computation technique based on the
behavioral patterns of swarms of bees in a field trying to locate
the area with the highest density of flowers. The algorithm can
be as summarized as follows:
• Define the solution space: select the parameters to be
optimized. Here, the parameters are DiaSGap, Length and
MagThck.
• Define a fitness function, which is the objective function
defined above in (1)
• Initialize Random Swarm Location and Velocities: 6
particles are used. The initial values for DiaSGap and
Length are random numbers between 50 mm to 300 mm and
the initial value for MagThck is a random number between
0 and 20 mm. This initial value range comes from the
typical values according to previous experience for 15 kW,
60 Hz and 1800 rpm SMPM machines. The particle is able
to travel out of this range if a better solution is found.
• Travel the particles through the solution space with the
following steps performed on each particle individually:
o Evaluate particle fitness: compare to global best
and personal best
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o Update the particles’ velocity according to the
relative values of pbest and gbest, using the following
expression:
vn = ω * vn + c1rand () * ( pbest ,n − xn ) + c2 rand () * ( gbest ,n − xn )
o Move the particle: The velocity is applied for a
normalized time-step Δt, which is usually chosen to
be 1, and the position is updated to
xn = xn + Δt * vn
• Repeat process starting at step 4. In this way the particle
moves for discrete time intervals until the termination
criteria are met. The maximum number of iteration is taken
as the terminating criteria here.
C. Genetic Algorithm [5]
Genetic Algorithm (GA) is a search procedure which
emulates the mechanics of natural selection and genetics. The
algorithms explore the motor parameter space using
mechanisms of reproduction, crossover and mutation, with the
aim of optimizing the machine design. Steps of solving the
machine design optimization problem using the analytical
design model with GA can be summarized as follows:
1) Encode any potential solution of the optimization problem into a
binary string, called a chromosome.
In this paper, the three design variables DiaSGap, Length and
MagThck are first converted into binary strings and a typical
chromosome is shown in Fig. 2. As the airgap diameter and axial
length for the motor being designed typically lies between 50
mm to 250 mm from previous experiences, an offset of 50 and a
scaling coefficient of 500 is used to scale the values of DiaSGap
and Length contained in the binary string to fall into the range of
50 mm to (217-1)/500+50 = 312 mm. Similarly, a scaling
coefficient of 100 is used to scale the binary value of the magnet
thickness to the range of 0 mm to (211-1)/100 = 20.1 mm. Here
NdFe35 with a residual flux density of 1.23 T and relatively
permeability of 1.099 is used and 0 to 20.1 mm is just enough to
cover the magnet thickness range for the machine under
consideration.
Figure 2 Illustration of chromosome
2) Create an initial population of chromosomes
For comparison purposes, the same population size of 6 is
chosen for the GA. The initial chromosomes are randomly
generated.
3) Evaluate the chromosomes by the objective function and assign a
fitness score accordingly.
Since the problem is trying to minimize the objective
function, the fitness score for each chromosome is 1 over its
objective function value, and then the chromosomes with less
objective function value will have a larger probability of being
selected to produce offspring. Sigma scaling as described in [5]
is applied to avoid premature convergence.
4) Select members from the current population to produce offspring.
Stochastic universal sampling [6] is used here, which exhibits
no bias and minimal spread and ensures a selection of offspring.
As the population size is 6, 6 pointers will be used in the
universal sampling and 6 chromosomes will be selected.
5) Perform crossover
6 pairs of parents are randomly picked from the 6
chromosomes selected in step 4). Uniform crossover is used,
where each gene in the offspring is created by copying the
corresponding gene from one or the other parent chosen
according to a random generated binary crossover mask [7].
6) Perform mutation
Each bit in the chromosome is subject to mutation with a
probability.
7) Repeat 3) to 6) until terminating criterion is met
The terminating criterion in this paper is chosen to be that the
number of generations has reached a prespecified maximum
value.
IV. RESULTS AND COMPARISONS
PSO and GA are implemented with the analytical model
described in section II and the objective function (1). PSO and
GA will be compared in terms their ability to find the correct
optimal solution and the computational efficiency in solving the
optimization problem. For comparison purposes, the PSO uses 6
particles and 100 iterations, while the GA uses a population size
of 6 and 100 generations. This results in an evaluation of 600
designs for both GA and PSO in a single run. A typical result of
running the PSO and GA for this machine design problem is
shown in Fig.4, where the best objective means the lowest value
of the objective function found by the GA or the PSO from the
beginning to the current iteration or generation. The result
shows that as the number of iterations or generations increases,
the PSO and GA are finding better solutions and finally reaches
the correct optima.
 sufficiently good optimal solution.
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Figure 3 Typical results of PSO and GA
A. Ability in finding the optimal solution
Although both the PSO and GA are actually stochastic
process where the performance may vary case by case, useful
observations can be summarized by running the program many
times. Statistical based performance comparisons are necessary
for such methods with probability and random initialization
involved. As a result, the optimization process is repeated for
both PSO and GA 18 times and the results are summarized in
Table I, where the coefficients of PSO and GA are carefully
tuned to improve the performance.
TABLE I
COMPARISON OF OPTIMAL OBJECTIVE FUNCTION VALUE (OFV) FOR 18 RUNS BY
PSO AND GA
Best Worst Average Standard Times to find correct
OFV OFV of OFV deviation optimal objective
of OFV
PSO 53.4 58.3 55.2 1.8 7
GA 53.6 59.7 56.0 2.1 3
If we use the criterion that a value of fewer than 54 for the
objective function is considered to be an optimal solution, then
Table 1 shows that PSO and GA are both able to find the optimal
solution with the 18 runs. However, PSO have a lower average
optimal OFV (55.2) than GA (56.0). The PSO also have less
standard deviations of the optimal OFV in 18 runs than the GA.
Moreover, PSO also has a higher probability to find the correct
optimal than GA (7 in 18 versus 3 in 18). All the above
comparison results indicate that the PSO have better
performance in finding the correct optimal solution than GA
from a stochastic point of view.
B. Computational efficiency
In this machine design problems, running the machine design
model to evaluate design candidates is the dominate part of the
overall computational burden. As a result, high computational
efficiency here means to find the correct optimal design solution
with less number of design candidates evaluated. In the actual
implementation of the computational intelligence algorithm in
optimization problems, the best optimal solution is found by
running the algorithm sufficient times with different running
coefficients. The overall computational efficiency is the product
of the population size, the number of iterations or generations,
and the times needed to run the algorithm in order to ensure a
1) Number of iterations or generations and population size
The number of iterations or generations needed depends on the
convergence rate of the problem, which is determined primarily
by the running coefficients. For example, a higher value of the
social acceleration constant in PSO or a lower sigma scaling
coefficient will increase the convergence rate. In fact,
convergence actually means reduced population size. As a
result, PSO and GA are compared by running both algorithms
 with reduced population size.
Results in Table II show that the performance of GA degrades
much faster than PSO as the population size goes down. With a
population size even as low as 2, the PSO still maintains
acceptable performance while GA is much worse.
3) Number of times needed to run the algorithm
The previous running experience in Table I shows that, once
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the running coefficients is properly tuned, a correct optimal V. CONCLUSIONS
solution can be found with certain probability by running the PSO and GA are applied to optimize the design of an SMPM
algorithm within 20 times. The problem of how many times motor according to user defined multi-objective functions with a
needed to run the algorithm is then effectively converted to how previous developed analytical model. The results are compared
many times needed to tune the running coefficients. The and show that PSO and GA both have the ability to find the
algorithm whose performance is more robust to the values of the correct optimal solution, and PSO has a slightly better
running coefficients needs less tuning, thus less number of times performance in terms of average and standard deviation from
will be needed to run the algorithm in total. The robustness of multiple runs of the algorithm. However, in terms of the
GA and PSO to their running coefficients is compared by computational efficiency, which is a key requirement for the
running the algorithms with randomly chosen running algorithms in the machine design, PSO outperforms GA
coefficients. The result is shown below in Table III. significantly. PSO has a lower performance degrading with a
smaller population size, and higher robustness to algorithm
TABLE II coefficients, which indicates that the fewer design candidate
PERFORMANCES COMPARISON OF PSO AND GA FOR REDUCED POPULATION SIZE evaluations is necessary for PSO. The comparison results
WITH 5 TIMES OF RUNNING EACH indicate that PSO can be preferred over GA when time is a
limiting factor. Although this work is carried out for a SMPM
Population size = 3 machine with and analytical design model, similarities in
Best Worst Average Standard Deviation machine design problem make it also applicable to the design of
other types of machines and with other modeling methods.
OFV OFV of OFV of OFV
PSO 55.2 59.7 57.5 2.1
GA 56.4 64.7 61.8 3.4 ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Population size = 2 Financial support for this work from the Office of Naval
Best Worst Average Standard Deviation Research is gratefully acknowledged.
OFV OFV of OFV of OFV
PSO 56.4 60.5 58.8 1.7 REFERENCES
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Swarm Intelligence", Swarm Intelligence Symposium 2008, St. Louis, pp.
1-5, September 2008.
TABLE III
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Practice and Optimization”, IEEE conference on Industrial Applications,
COEFFICIENTS WITH 15 TIMES OF RUNS EACH
pp. 1905 – 1911, 2006
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OFV OFV of OFV
[4] J. Robinson and Y. Rahmat-Samii, “Particle Swarm Optimization in
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[6] James E. Baker. “Reducing Bias and Inefficiency in the Selection
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according to the range of the variable and it does not need
carefully tuning, they will not be randomized. The results show
clearly that PSO has a lower average and standard deviation and
GA’s worst solution of 72, is significantly higher than the 61.8
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is important for GA while can be neglected or not carefully
treated for PSO and the time saving in the tuning is pronounced
as the modeling techniques become more intensive.

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