Application of Iterative Particle Swarm Optimization for Reflected Wave Travel time Inversion

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, a significant evolution in optimization theory has been noticed. This paper introduces a new technique termed as Iterative Particle Swarm Optimization which is an improved version of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). In this paper we have shown the application of Iterative Particle Swarm Optimization for the inversion of reflected wave travel time data to derive P wave velocity and thickness of each layer of the assumed four layered Earth model. The performance of Iterative PSO has also been compared with standard PSO for noise free data sets. The search space is kept same for both the inversion techniques. The comparison demonstrates that Iterative PSO shows much better convergence than standard PSO. The inverted model parameters were found to be independent of the search space, thereby showing the robustness of the algorithm.