A differential evolution approach for solving integer programming problems

Abstract

Basic differential evolution (DE), a potential optimizer, is mainly used for dealing with problem having continuous variables. However, it is observed that many real-life problems occurring in different fields such as chemical engineering, computer science, and management science deal with integer variables. Such problems are known as integer programming problems (IPP) and require a suitable technique for their solution. In the present study, we propose some slight modifications in basic structure of DE and apply it for solving PP. The proposed algorithm is named differential evolution for IPP (DEIPP), and its performance is evaluated on a set of benchmark problems. It is observed that our suggested DEIPP is quite efficient for dealing with optimization problem having integer or discrete and binary variables.