Differential evolution applied to large scale parametric interval linear systems

Abstract

Differential evolution (DE) is regarded to be a very effective optimisation method for continuous problems in terms of both good optimal solution approximation and short computation time. The authors applied DE method to the problem of solving large scale interval linear systems. Different variants of DE were compared and different strategies were used to ensure that candidate solutions generated in the process of recombination mechanism were always feasible. For the large scale problems the method occurred to be very sensitive to the constraint handling strategy used, so finding an appropriate strategy was very important to achieve good solutions in a reasonable time. Real world large optimisation problems coming from structural engineering were used as the test problems. Additionally DE performance was compared with evolutionary optimisation method presented in [10]. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.