Biological invasion-inspired migration in distributed evolutionary algorithms

Migration strategy plays an important role in designing effective distributed evolutionary algorithms. In this work, a novel migration model inspired to the phenomenon known as biological invasion is devised. The migration strategy is implemented through a multistage process involving invading subpopulations and their competition with native individuals. Such a general approach is used within a stepping-stone parallel model adopting Differential Evolution as the local algorithm. The resulting distributed algorithm is evaluated on a wide set of classical test functions against a large number of sequential and other distributed versions of Differential Evolution available in literature. The findings show that, in most of the cases, the proposed algorithm is able to achieve better performance in terms of both solution quality and convergence rate. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.