Synthesis of Large Unequally Spaced Planar Arrays Utilizing Differential Evolution With New Encoding Mechanism and Cauchy Mutation

This article presents a differential evolution algorithm with a new encoding mechanism and Cauchy mutation (DE-NEM-CM) for optimizing large unequally spaced planar array layouts with the minimum element spacing constraint. In the new encoding mechanism, each individual represents a certain element position rather than an entire array layout used in traditional stochastic optimization algorithms. Such an encoding mechanism has the following advantages: 1) in each individual updating, the array pattern can be efficiently evaluated by only considering the radiation contribution variation from one element movement, which can greatly reduce the computational time; 2) it naturally facilitates the generated new array layout in population updating to meet the minimum element spacing constraint, and 3) each individual is searched always in 2-D space as the array size increases. These advantages enable it to be very suitable for synthesizing large arrays. Besides, DE serves as a search engine, and Cauchy mutation with chaotic mapping is proposed to enhance the local search while preserving the diversity of the population. A set of experiments for synthesizing different types of unequally spaced planar arrays in both narrow-and broadband applications are conducted. Synthesis results show that the proposed method achieves much lower sidelobe level than some state-of-the-art stochastic optimization methods for all the test cases. Importantly, the proposed method is much more efficient than conventional stochastic optimization algorithm especially for the case of synthesizing large unequally spaced planar array layouts. A array layout optimization with more than 1000 elements can be achieved within acceptable CPU time cost, which has not yet been reported for the existing stochastic optimization methods without resorting to supercomputing facilities.