An adaptive differential evolution with combined strategy for global numerical optimization

Differential evolution (DE) is a simple yet powerful evolutionary algorithm for numerical optimization. However, the performance of DE significantly relies on its mutation operator and control parameters (scaling factor and crossover rate). In this paper, we propose a novel DE variant by introducing a series of combined strategies into DE, called CSDE. Specifically, in CSDE, to obtain a proper balance between global exploration ability and local exploitation ability, we adopt two mutation operators with different characteristics to produce the mutant vector, and provide a mechanism based on their own historical success rate to coordinate the two adopted mutation operators. Moreover, we combine a periodic function based on one modulo operation, an individual-independence macro-control function and an individual-dependence function based on individual’s fitness value information to adaptively produce scaling factor and crossover rate. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed CSDE, comparison experiments contained seven other state-of-the-art DE variants are tested on a suite of 30 benchmark functions and four real-world problems. The simulation results demonstrate that CSDE achieves the best overall performance among the eight DE variants.