A Two-Phase Constraint-Handling Technique for Constrained Optimization

Abstract

A two-phase constraint-handling technique is integrated into the evolutionary algorithms to solve constrained optimization problems (called TPDE) in this article. In phase one, denoted as the exploration phase, an exterior penalty function method with the dynamic penalty coefficients is developed to compare any two candidate solutions, which aims to push the population into the feasible region. To reduce the computational burden, in phase two, denoted as the exploitation phase, an interior penalty function method with the dynamic penalty coefficients is developed, which enhances the search ability by using the information of constraints in feasible solutions. During the optimization process, differential evolution is adopted as the search algorithm to produce the offspring population. Experiment results on four benchmark test suites, namely, IEEE CEC 2006, IEEE CEC 2010, IEEE CEC 2017, and IEEE CEC 2020, indicate that TPDE is competitive with other popular algorithms.