A software tool for teaching of particle swarm optimization fundamentals

Swarm intelligence courses have been offered at many universities all over the world from early 1990s. However, the field of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) – a swarm intelligence technique – is still relatively young without any standard teaching method. This paper describes an educational software tool for aid the teaching of PSO fundamentals in MATLAB© (MATrix LABoratory) software environment of MathWorks. In this context, an application of mobile robotics planning is developed with a friendly graphical user interface in MATLAB for teaching PSO design. Graduate students of Intelligent Systems course of Industrial and Systems Engineering Graduate Program at Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR, Brazil) can then use this educational software tool called PSOLeT (particle swarm optimization learning tool) to learn and evaluate basic optimization designs. This paper also summarizes the proposed software tool and gives an application in mobile robotics.