Hybrid Differential Evolution for Global Numerical Optimization

Abstract

Differential evolution (DE) is an efficient and versatile evolutionary algorithm for global numerical optimization over continuous domain. Although DE is good at exploring the search space, it is slow at the exploitation of the solutions. To alleviate this drawback, in this paper, we propose a generalized hybrid generation scheme, which attempts to enhance the exploitation and accelerate the convergence velocity of the original DE algorithm. In the hybrid generation scheme the operator with powerful exploitation is hybridized with the original DE operator. In addition, a self-adaptive exploitation factor is introduced to control the frequency of the exploitation operation. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed generation scheme, the migration operator of biogeography-based optimization is employed as the exploitation operator. Moreover, 23 benchmark functions (including 10 test functions provided by CEC2005 special session) are chosen from the literature as the test suite. Experimental results confirm that the new hybrid generation scheme is able to enhance the exploitation of the original DE algorithm and speed up its convergence rate.