In this paper we test a particular variant of the (Repulsive) Particle Swarm method on some rather difficult global optimization problems. A number of these problems are collected from the extant literature and a few of them are newly introduced. First, we introduce the Particle Swarm method of...

Development of village, micro and small enterprises in India has a special significance with regard to bridging up the disparities between urban and rural sectors of the economy on the one hand and the more industrialized and the less industrialized states on the other. It would also channelize...

This study is an investigation into the real wage rates of casual labourers in Shillong, the capital city of Meghalaya. First, trends in nominal wages during 1997-2000 have been studied. Then the consumption expenditure of casual labourers on wage goods is analysed and finally, changes in prices...

This paper aims at comparing the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, some relatively difficult test functions have been chosen. Among these test functions, some are new while others are well known in...

Meghalaya, a state in the North Eastern India, is inhabited by over 2.3 million of population of which 70 percent are Christian, 13 percent are Hindus and a little over 4 percent are Muslims as obtained in the Census 2001. In this study we investigate if numerical dominance of a community leads...

Our day-to-day experience suggests that certain variables are local in their effects. The influence of such variables is limited within the boundaries of the spatial entity (district) where they are physically located. In contrast, the effects of some other variables are percolating or pervasive...

The demographic canvas of the North Eastern Region of India (NER) is perhaps the most colourful and enchanting in the whole nation. We do not find in any other part of the country such a variety – anthropologically, socially, linguistically, culturally, economically, politically and...

Correlation matrices have many applications, particularly in marketing and financial economics - such as in risk management, option pricing and to forecast demand for a group of products in order to realize savings by properly managing inventories, etc. Various methods have been proposed by...

Structural change which is inherent in an evolving economy refers to a long-term widespread transformation of the fundamental relationships among different parts and organic constituents of it, rather than micro scale or short-term change in output and employment. Short-term economic challenges...

The objective of this paper is to introduce a new population-based (stochastic) heuristic to search the global optimum of a (continuous) multi-modal function and to assess its performance (on a fairly large number of benchmark functions) vis-à-vis that of two other well-established and very...