An adaptive differential evolution algorithm using fitness distance correlation and neighbourhood-based mutation strategy

Abstract

Differential evolution (DE), as an extremely powerful evolutionary algorithm, has recently been widely employed within complex reality optimisation problems. However, the DE algorithm mainly focuses on strengthening the adaptability of exploitation, which allows the sensitivity of the DE algorithm to be solved in cases where the effects of solving various types of problems are quite different. Moreover, the local search ability and population diversity have not been solved properly. Therefore, an adaptive DE algorithm using fitness distance correlation and a neighbourhood-based strategy (FNADE) is proposed. FNADE introduces the fitness distance correlation (FDC) as the basis for judging the difficulty of the problem, utilises a Voronoi diagram to increase the population diversity for complex multimodal problems and adopts the neighbourhood-based mutation strategy to strengthen the local search capability. FNADE is committed to solving unconstrained single-objective optimisation problems. The proposed algorithm is compared with six advanced DE algorithms in terms of CEC2017 benchmark functions. The experimental results show that the adaptive DE algorithm using FNADE is superior to other DE algorithms with regard to the accuracy and population diversity of the solution.