DE/isolated/1: A New Mutation Operator for Multimodal Optimization with Differential Evolution

This paper proposes a new variant of differential evolution for multimodal optimization termed DE/isolated/1. It generates new individuals close to an isolated individual in a current population as a niching scheme. This mechanism will evenly allocate search resources for each optimum. The proposed method was evaluated along with the existing methods through computational experiments using eight two-dimensional multimodal functions as benchmarks. Experimental results show that the proposed method shows better performance for several functions which are not effectively solved by existing algorithms.