Multi-Population Differential Evolution Algorithm with Uniform Local Search

Differential evolution (DE) is a very effective stochastic optimization algorithm based on population for solving various real-world problems. The quality of solutions to these problems is mainly determined by the combination of mutation strategies and their parameters in DE. However, in the process of solving these problems, the population diversity and local search ability will gradually deteriorate. Therefore, we propose a multi-population differential evolution (MUDE) algorithm with a uniform local search to balance exploitation and exploration. With MUDE, the population is divided into multiple subpopulations with different population sizes, which perform different mutation strategies according to the evolution ratio, i.e., DE/rand/1, DE/current-to-rand/1, and DE/current-to-pbest/1. To improve the diversity of the population, the information is migrated between subpopulations by the soft-island model. Furthermore, the local search ability is improved by way of the uniform local search. As a result, the proposed MUDE maintains exploitation and exploration capabilities throughout the process. MUDE is extensively evaluated on 25 functions of the CEC 2005 benchmark. The comparison results show that the MUDE algorithm is very competitive with other DE variants and optimization algorithms in generating efficient solutions.