A new guiding force strategy for differential evolution

Abstract

Past few decades have witnessed the growth and development of different optimization techniques that can be applied for solving complex problems that are otherwise difficult to solve by traditional methods. Differential evolution (DE) has attained the reputation of a powerful optimization technique that can be used for solving a wide range of problems. In DE, mutation is the most important operator as it helps in generating a new solution vector. In this paper we propose an additional mutation strategy for DE. The suggested strategy is named DE/rand-to-best-best/2. It makes use of an additional parameter called guiding force parameter K, which takes a value between (0,1) besides using the scaling factor F, which has a fixed value. DE/rand-to-best-best/2 makes use of two difference vectors, where the difference is taken from the best solution vector. One vector difference will be produced with a randomly generated mutation factor K (0,1). Advantage of this strategy is, it will add a different vector to the old one and search space will increase with a random factor. Result shows that this strategy performs well in comparison to other mutation strategies of DE. © 2015, The Society for Reliability Engineering, Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM), India and The Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden.