A Self-adaptive Differential Evolution Algorithm for Solving Optimization Problems

Abstract

This research proposes a novel self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm for solving continuous optimization problems. This paper focuses on re-desiging the self-adaptive strategy for the mutation parameters. The new muta-tion parameters adjust themselves to the current situation of the algorithm. When the search is stagnant, the first mutation parameter that scales the differ-ence between the best vector and the target vector will be increased. In contrast, the second mutation parameter that scales the difference between two random target vectors will be decreased. On the other hand, when the search progresses well towards the global optimum, the algorithm will enhance the search of the surrounding space by doing the opposite of the above actions. The performance of the proposed self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm was evaluated and compared with the classic differential evolution algorithm on 7 benchmark functions. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm con-verged much faster than the classic differential evolution algorithm on all benchmark functions.