Investigation of mutation strategies in differential evolution for solving global optimization problems

Abstract

Differential evolution (DE) is one competitive form of evolutionary algorithms. It heavily relies on mutating solutions using scaled differences of randomly selected individuals from the population to create new solutions. The choice of a proper mutation strategy is important for the success of an DE algorithm. This paper presents an empirical investigation to examine and compare the different mutation strategies for global optimization problems. Both solution quality and computational expense of DE variants were evaluated with experiments conducted on a set of benchmark problems. The results of such comparative study would offer valuable insight and information to develop optimal or adaptive mutation strategies for future DE researches and applications. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.