Modifications for the Differential Evolution Algorithm

Abstract

Differential Evolution (DE) is a method of optimization used in symmetrical optimization problems and also in problems that are not even continuous, and are noisy and change over time. DE optimizes a problem with a population of candidate solutions and creates new candidate solutions per generation in combination with existing rules according to discriminatory rules. The present work proposes two variations for this method. The first significantly improves the termination of the method by proposing an asymptotic termination rule, which is based on the differentiation of the average of the function values in the population of DE. The second modification proposes a new scheme for a critical parameter of the method, which improves the method’s ability to better explore the search space of the objective function. The proposed variations have been tested on a number of problems from the current literature, and from the experimental results, it appears that the proposed modifications render the method quite robust and faster even in large-scale problems.