Surrogate-assisted distributed swarm optimisation for computationally expensive models

Advances in parallel and distributed computing have enabled efficient implementation of the distributed swarm and evolutionary algorithms for complex and computationally expensive models. Evolutionary algorithms provide gradient-free optimisation which is beneficial for models that do not have such information available, for instance, geoscientific landscape evolution models. However, such models are so computationally expensive that even distributed swarm and evolutionary algorithms with the power of parallel computing struggle. We need to incorporate efficient strategies such as surrogate assisted optimisation that further improves their performance; however, this becomes a challenge given parallel processing and inter-process communication for implementing surrogate training and prediction. In this paper, we implement surrogate-based estimation of fitness evaluation in distributed swarm optimisation over a parallel computing architecture. Our results demonstrate very promising results for benchmark functions and geoscientific landscape evolution models. We obtain a reduction in computationally time while retaining optimisation solution accuracy through the use of surrogates in a parallel computing environment.