Uniform distribution driven adaptive differential evolution

摘要

Evolutionary algorithms are popular optimization tools for real-world applications due to their numerous advantages such as capability of parallel search along multiple directions by maintaining a population of candidates, invariance to certain mathematical properties (convexity, continuity and hardness) of fitness landscape and ability to handle black-box problems. However, most of the current evolutionary algorithms are loosely based on heuristics inspired by nature and lack the crucial theoretical background. Motivated by the overwhelming advantages of such optimization algorithms and the necessity for theoretical foundation, this paper presents a new evolutionary algorithm - UDE (Uniform Differential Evolution) for solving single- objective optimization problems along with a theoretical analysis of the proposed UDE algorithm. Thus, this paper formally gives insights about the features and properties of the various optimization strategies used. This method is different from traditional Differential Evolution variants as it employs a uniform probability distribution for generating new candidate solutions. UDE is further developed to obtain an adaptive evolutionary algorithm - Adaptive UDE (AUDE), which has shown to obtain significant improvements in the performance and convergence speeds compared to other algorithms on a benchmark set of 19 test problems. The source codes are available at http://worksupplements.droppages.com/ude_aude.