A DE-Based Scatter Search for Global Optimization Problems

Abstract

This paper proposes a hybrid scatter search (SS) algorithm for continuous global optimization problems by incorporating the evolution mechanism of differential evolution (DE) into the reference set updated procedure of SS to act as the new solution generation method. This hybrid algorithm is called a DE-based SS (SSDE) algorithm. Since different kinds of mutation operators of DE have been proposed in the literature and they have shown different search abilities for different kinds of problems, four traditional mutation operators are adopted in the hybrid SSDE algorithm. To adaptively select the mutation operator that is most appropriate to the current problem, an adaptive mechanism for the candidate mutation operators is developed. In addition, to enhance the exploration ability of SSDE, a reinitialization method is adopted to create a new population and subsequently construct a new reference set whenever the search process of SSDE is trapped in local optimum. Computational experiments on benchmark problems show that the proposed SSDE is competitive or superior to some state-of-the-art algorithms in the literature.