A real-integer-discrete-coded differential evolution

The successful application of the real-coded differential evolution (DE) to a wide range of real-valued problems has motivated researchers to investigate its potentiality to integer and discrete valued problems. In most of such works, a real-valued solution is converted into a desired integer-valued solution by applying some posterior decoding mechanisms. Only a limited number of works are found, in which attempts are made for developing an actual integer-coded DE. In this article, such a DE is presented which can work directly with real, integer and discrete variables of a problem without any conversion. In the computational experiments carried out with a set of test problems taken from literature, the DE improved several previously known best solutions, as well as outperformed some similar proposals in most of the cases. (C) 2013 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.