An Improved Combinatorial Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm to Database Vertical Partition

Vertical partition is an important technique in database design used to enhance performance in database systems. Vertical fragmentation is a combinatorial optimization problem that is NP-hard in most cases. The authors propose an application and an adaptation of an Improved Combinatorial Particle Swarm Optimization (ICPSO) algorithm for the vertical fragmentation problem. The original CPSO algorithm suffers from major drawback - redundant encoding. This paper applies an improved version of CPSO that using the Restricted Growth (RG) string constraint to manipulate the particles so that redundant particles are excluded during the PSO process.