Hybrid particle swarm-differential evolution algorithm and its engineering applications

Differential evolution (DE) has been applied to solve various optimization problems due to its simplicity and high search efficiency. However, researchers have confirmed that it still has some shortcomings such as premature convergence and slow convergence, especially when dealing with complex optimization problems. To address these concerning issues, this paper proposes a hybrid particle swarm-differential evolution algorithm (HPSDE). Firstly, to enhance the optimization performance, a modified updating scheme named particle-swarm mutation strategy is designed and an improved control parameters adaption is developed. Then, DE/rand-to-rand/1 mutation strategy is adopted to increase the population diversity and enhance the ability of particles escaping away from local optima. To achieve an improved DE variant with rapid convergence and fine stability, a random mutation framework is designed to combine the two mutation strategies mentioned above. To evaluate the efficiency of HPSDE algorithm, four different experiments have been taken on twenty-nine benchmark functions. The numerical results validate that HPSDE has better overall performance than the other competitors. Additionally, HPSDE is successfully applied to solve five typical engineering optimization problems.