LIU et al.: GPU-ACCELERATED PARALLEL COEVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM 1221
Inspired by biological computing, evolutionary computation
techniques are proposed to solve this problem. Genetic algo-
rithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm
have attracted much attention in the investigation of PMSM
parameter identification. It is because the evolutionary algo-
rithms have the ability to obtain a suitable set of parameter
values via optimizing objective function between the system
ideal model and the actual models. GA was proposed to identify
multiparameter of PMSM including stator winding resistance,
dq-axis inductances, and rotor flux linkage. However, the accu-
racy and stability of these parameters estimation need to be
improved, since GA tends to lose diversity and easily get
trapped in local optima [22], [23] during the later evolution
process when solving complex problems. Some researchers
propose an intelligent system parameter identification approach
by utilizing the PSO algorithm [24], [25]. Since PSO is easy to
implement on the computer and superior in convergence speed,
the intelligent estimator is effective in estimating the stator
resistance and disturbed load torque. However, it cannot exactly
estimate multiple parameters simultaneously (winding resis-
tance, dq-axis inductances, and permanent magnet flux identifi-
cation). The reason is that the basic PSO can be easily trapped
in local minima when solving complex nonlinear problem.
Hence, several algorithms are developed to improve the solu-
tion performances of PSO. A hybrid PSO with mutation was
proposed by Ahmed et al. in [26]. Juang et al. proposed another
hybrid PSO algorithm associated with the genetic operator in
[27]. The diversity of PSO is significantly enhanced using the
GA operators. Compared with the basic PSO, a hybrid PSO
combined with wavelet dynamic mutating space was proposed
in [28], which can obtain dynamic optimization effect. Liang
et al. proposed a comprehensive learning PSO (CLPSO) in [29].
All the flying directions of individuals were updated by ran-
domly selected particles during the iteration process. Although
the method in [29] was superior in keeping diversity, it did
not design a scheme to help the particles jump out of the
local optima when the whole population was homogeneous dur-
ing the later evolution process. The same defect also exists
in another improved CLPSO using different pbests [30]. A
parameter-adaptive regulation scheme and an elitist learning
strategy were introduced into the PSO by Zhan et al. [31], who
presented an adaptive PSO (APSO) that can accelerate the con-
vergence speed and jump out of the local optima. Nevertheless,
it still needs expert judgment on the evolutionary state, which
may be difficult to determine. As the spatial distribution of
multiple populations was broad and outperformed a single
population in terms of diversity, other researchers proposed a
multipopulation scheme to improve the diversity of basic PSO
[32]–[35]. For instance, Bergh et al. [32] proposed a multiple
PSO algorithm, in which the whole population was split into
many small swarms. It showed a better performance than single
PSO. However, this method is redundant in iteration comput-
ing because there is no information interaction between these
isolated swarms. A coevolutionary PSO was discussed in [33],
where a truncated Gaussian distribution function is utilized
to accelerate the convergence speed. Reference [34] proposed
a dynamic multiswarm PSO embedded with an adaptively
adjusted scheme. In order to solve multiple-objective prob-
lems, Zhan et al. [35] proposed a multiple populations PSO,
which used an external shared archive and another two novel
operator, including velocity modification and elitist learning
strategy to enhance the performance. However, coevolutionary
PSO always has mass data to analyze during machine operation.
The proposed methods, executed in conventional CPU, may
take considerably l ong time. In fact, it does not take full advan-
tage of the inherent parallelism of population-based intelligent
computing techniques. This disadvantage severely restricts the
practical applications of PSO in parameters estimation and con-
dition monitoring of PMSM. Therefore, the GPU-accelerated
massively parallel computing technique becomes a major com-
plementary way to speedup those population-based intelligent
algorithms.
Motivated by coevolution theory [36], artificial immune sys-
tem (AIS) [37], [38], and GPU parallel computing technique
[39], a novel parallel coevolutionary immune PSO algorithm,
accelerated by graphics processing unit (GPU) technique (G-
PCIPSO), is proposed for multiparameter identification and
temperature monitoring of PMSM in this paper. The framework
of G-PCIPSO consists of one high-level memory population
and several bottom normal swarms based on parallel comput-
ing model of GPUs. In G-PCIPSO, the global best individuals
of normal swarms are regarded as antibody (Ab) in immune sys-
tem and memorized in the high-level memory, which serves as a
leader set. The memory is updated using the improved immune
clonal-selection operator. Then an immune vaccine-enhanced
operator is employed to accelerate the convergence speed
of Pbests. The information sharing mechanism is employed
for the information exchange between memory and different
swarms. Moreover, the proposed method is implemented on the
GPU using the compute unified device architecture (CUDA)
(NVIDIA Corporation). Finally, the proposed method is applied
to PMSM multiple parameter identification and temperature
monitoring. It shows that the method’s performance is much
better than the existing improved hybrid PSOs in simultane-
ously estimating multiple electric parameters of the machine
system. In addition, the proposed method can not only track
the varied physical parameter but also realize temperature
monitoring online effectively. The experiments show that the
proposed approach demonstrates high efficiency compared with
a CPU-based serial execution.
Our main contributions can be summarized as follows.
1) The proposed hierarchical-based multiple population
cooperative scheme can improve the population search
performance since the immunity-based high-level mem-
ory can reserve valuable historical knowledge, and the
excellent solution information can spread between differ-
ent subswarms through the designed information sharing
updated scheme of particles in bottom level.
2) Immune concepts are introduced into PSO to overcome
the blindness in action of gBest particles (antibodies in
memory) and Pbest particles stochastic evolution in solv-
ing parameters identification and temperature monitoring
of PMSM. Immune clonal-selection operating with an
adaptive wavelet mutation for gBest and an immune vac-
cine operator for Pbest are introduced. The proposed
parameter estimator is capable of identifying parame-
ters dynamically and adaptively for time-varying and
nonlinear PMSM system.