Modified differential evolution with local search algorithm for real world optimization

Real world optimization problems are used to judge the performance of any Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) over real world applications. This is why the performance of any EA over the real world optimization problems is very important for judging its efficiency. In this work, we represent a multi-population based memetic algorithm CDELS. It is hybridization of a competitive variant of Differential Evolution (DE) and a Local Search method. As the number of optima is large in this case, we have also incorporated a distant search method to hop from one optima to other optima. However, it is well known that DE has fast but less reliable convergence property. To overcome this limitation, a hybrid mutation strategy is developed to balance between exploration and thorough search. In addition, a proximity checking method is applied to distribute the subpopulations over a larger portion of the search space as this further enhances the searching ability of the algorithm. The performance of CDELS algorithm is evaluated on the test suite provided for the Competition on Testing Evolutionary Algorithms on Real-world Numerical Optimization Problems in the 2011 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation and the simulation results are shown in this paper.