Abstract:  A comparative study of global function optimization and population migration shows that there are similarities between the two processes．In this paper‚a new search algorithm for global optimization—population migration algorithm（PMA） is proposed by the simulation of population migration．The algorithm mainly simulates population transition with economics and dispersion with population pressure increment‚the former encourages the algorithm to search in a region with good solutions‚the latter avoids getting stuck in a local optimum to a certain degree．Numerical experiment proves the global optimization capability of PMA．

Key words:  population migration algorithm, global optimization, computational intelligence