An adaptive population size based Differential Evolution by mining historical population similarity for path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

Various variants have been proposed to improve the search ability and efficiency of Differential Evolution (DE). However, the variants ignore the impact caused by the use of accumulated historical information, resulting in unpromising performance of the search. Furthermore, the global exploration and local exploitation ability of population is affected by the population number (NP), which commonly adapts with little adaptive control or with linear descendent only. To utilize more historical population information, we propose in this paper a novel adaptive population size-based DE (APSDE) by mining historical population information, to balance global exploration and local exploitation ability. APSDE uses historical population information to mine population distribution and extract information to assign parameters to the current population. Moreover, an archive is utilized to store the historical population information, where historical successful parameter information consists of scaling factor (F), crossover rate (CR) and NP for better balancing the search ability of population. To evaluate the performance of APSDE, we conduct experiments both on the 28 benchmark functions of CEC2017, the 10 benchmark functions of CEC2020, and a real-world application - the path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The experimental results have demonstrated that APSDE achieves the promising performance in both convergence accuracy and convergence speed.