In recent years population based methods such as genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming, evolution strategies and genetic programming have been increasingly employed to solve a variety of optimisation problems. Recently, another novel population based optimisation algorithm - namely the particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm, was introduced by R. Eberhart and J. Kennedy (1995). Although the PSO algorithm possesses some attractive properties, its solution quality has been somewhat inferior to other evolutionary optimisation algorithms (P. Angeline, 1998). We propose a number of techniques to improve the standard PSO algorithm. Similar techniques have been employed in the context of self organising maps and neural-gas networks (T. Kohonen, 1990; T.M. Martinez et al., 1994).