This paper presents an improved differential evolution (DE) based on orthogonal crossover to solve complex absolute value equation problems. Absolute value equation problems are NP-hard multimodal problems. Differential evolution (DE) is one of fast and robust, accurate evolutionary algorithms for global optimization problems and solution of absolute value equation problems. In this paper, orthogonal based differential evolution, which is proposed through incorporation differential evolution with orthogonal crossover, is excogitated to solve three absolute value equation problems. Several experiments are conducted on absolute value equation problems, the solution accuracy, convergence rate and robustness of ODE are compared with other state-ofthe-art orthogonal based algorithms. The comparison results show that ODE is a fast, effective, efficient and robust algorithm for solving absolute value equation problems.