Enhancing discrete differential evolution by conducting election

Abstract

Differential Evolution (DE) is a population-based algorithm which has been successfully used to solve optimization problems. DE algorithm begins with an initial population with some randomly generated candidate solutions. During evolutionary process, the population of candidate solutions is evolved toward the promising region by using the specific operations. The population in the DE algorithm can resemble an especial perspective of a small society which has individuals to seek a common goal. In a society, the election system is commonly used as an effective approach; which is employed to determine one or several representatives who are responsible to make major decisions. Some machine learning algorithms are inspired from the society election system to develop an enhanced algorithm from a pool of potential algorithms with the complementary performances. This study is motivated from the election systems of societies which can be applied on population-based algorithms, here DE algorithm as a case study. We propose an election-based discrete DE algorithm which uses the information of all candidate solutions to create a new trial solution as a president candidate solution. During optimization phases, after applying the evolutionary operators, all candidate solutions vote to select the values of president's variables. In the proposed method, a majority voting method is applied to choose a value for each variable of the president candidate solution. We employ the discrete DE (DDE) algorithm as the parent algorithm to develop election-based discrete DE (EDDE) which is evaluated on the fifteen discrete benchmark functions. Simulation results confirm that EDDE obtains a promising performance on the majority of these functions.