Analysis of optimization capability of selection operator for DE algorithm

Abstract

Differential Evolution Algorithm (DE) is an intelligent algorithm widely used in recent years. Many scholars have studied DE algorithm from many aspects, such as theory and application. Selection operator using greedy strategy is an important part of DE algorithm. Traditionally thought, the DE selection operator is only a means to maintain effective population evolution of DE. In fact, the DE selection operator also has some capability to optimize. For this reason, this paper constructs some DE variants, and compares the optimization results of them with the standard DE algorithm. Simulation results show that the new algorithm which only using greedy selection can achieve certain optimization results, meanwhile, DE algorithm which removing its greedy selection operator only has poor performance. This proves that DE selection operator has certain optimization capability.