Differential Evolution with Adaptive Guiding Mechanism Based on Heuristic Rules

Abstract

This paper proposes to resolve the limitation of differential evolution (DE) that the difference between the individuals in search behavior has not yet been utilized effectively for guiding the evolution of the population. An adaptive guiding mechanism (AGM) based on the heuristic rules is thus suggested to make possible, individual-dependent guidance. The AGM mainly comprises three stages: construction, separation, and guidance. In the construction stage, the elite leadership team (ELT) is established with an adaptive control scheme by using good information of the population. In the separation stage, the ELT is divided into distinct elite groups that are allocated to different individuals based on their search behaviors. In the guidance stage, the leader that is chosen from the respective elite group, as well as the promising directions extracted from the population, are used together to guide the search of each individual. By incorporating AGM into DE, a novel algorithm framework, named DE with AGM (DE-AGM), is proposed to enhance the performance of DE. As a general framework, DE-AGM can be easily and seamlessly applied to most DE variants. The experimental results on 58 benchmark functions have demonstrated the competitive performance of DE-AGM.