Several stability analyses and stable regions of particle swarm optimization (PSO) have been proposed before. The assumption of stagnation and different definitions of stability are adopted in these analyses. In this paper, the order-2 stability of PSO is analyzed based on a weak stagnation assumption. A new definition of stability is proposed and an order-2 stable region is obtained. Several existing stable analyses for canonical PSO are compared, especially their definitions of stability and the corresponding stable regions. It is shown that the classical stagnation assumption is too strict and not necessary. Moreover, among all these definitions of stability, it is shown that our definition requires the weakest conditions, and additional conditions bring no benefit. Finally, numerical experiments are reported to show that the obtained stable region is meaningful. A new parameter combination of PSO is also shown to be good, even better than some known best parameter combinations.
Keywords: Particle swarm optimization; order-2 stability analysis; order-2 stable region; parameter selection; weak stagnation.