A Novel Multi-Objective Shuffled Complex Differential Evolution Algorithm with Application to Hydrological Model Parameter Optimization

Practice experience suggests that the traditional calibration of hydrological models with single objective cannot properly measure all of the behaviors of the hydrological system. To circumvent this problem, in recent years, a lot of studies have looked into calibration of hydrological models with multi-objective. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-objective evolution algorithm entitled multi-objective shuffled complex differential evolution (MOSCDE) algorithm, which is an extension of the famous single objective algorithm, shuffled complex evolution (SCE-UA) algorithm, to the multi-objective framework. This new proposed algorithm replaces the simplex search used in SCE-UA with the differential evolution (DE) algorithm and can more thoroughly utilize the information of the individuals in the evolutionary population and improve the search ability of the algorithm. Meanwhile, the Cauchy mutation (CM) operator is employed to prevent the algorithm from falling into the local optimal region of the feasible space. Moreover, two types of archive sets are employed to further improve the performance of the algorithm. The efficacy of the MOSCDE algorithm is first tested on five benchmark problems. After achieving satisfactory performance on the test problems, the MOSCDE is applied to multi-objective parameter optimization of a hydrological model for daily runoff forecasting. The results show that the MOSCDE algorithm can be a viable alternative for multi-objective parameter optimization of hydrological model.