CS-DE: Cooperative Strategy based Differential Evolution with population diversity enhancement

Abstract

Differential Evolution (DE) is one of the most effective approaches in Evolutionary Computation to tackling complex black-box optimization, however, the overall performance of a DE variant is heavily dependent on its mutation strategy and the associated parameter control schemes. According to the “No free Lunch theorem”, every mutation strategy has its own fatal defect, therefore, DE variant with a single mutation strategy can not tackle all optimization problems. Furthermore, DE variant with ensemble of mutation strategies usually needs more parameter control schemes, which inevitably decreases the practicality of it. Here in this paper, a novel Cooperative Strategy based DE (CS-DE) with population diversity enhancement is proposed, and the CS-DE algorithm has the following contributions: First, a cooperative strategy pool containing two similar mutation strategies is advanced in the algorithm, and the two mutation strategies share the same parameter control. Second, a novel grouping strategy is proposed, then the two mutation strategies can be chosen in an adaptive manner by different individuals in generating trial vectors during the evolution. Third, novel adaptation schemes for the three control parameters F,CR and PS as well as a stagnation based re-initialization mechanism are also proposed in our CS-DE algorithm. 58 benchmarks from the CEC2013 and CEC2014 test suites are employed in algorithm validation, and experiment results show the competitiveness of the CS-DE algorithm with several state-of-the-art DE variants.