Abstract. In this paper, five previous Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms for multimodal function optimization are reviewed. A new and a successful PSO based algorithm, named as CPSO is proposed. CPSO enhances the exploration and exploitation capabilities of PSO by performing search using a random walk and a hill climbing components. Furthermore, one of the previous PSO approaches is improved incredibly by means of a minor adjustment. All algorithms are compared over a set of well-known benchmark functions.