Apply differential evolution with individual-dependent mechanism to solve the ship stowage planning problem of coils in the steel industry

Differential evolution (DE) is a very simple and effective stochastic search algorithm, which obtains various performances with different parameter and searching strategy configurations. DE with an individual-dependent mechanism (IDE) is a recently proposed DE variant, which includes an individual-dependent parameter (IDP) setting method and an individual-dependent mutation (IDM) strategy. In this paper, to validate the ability of IDE on solving real-world optimization problem, we first modify it by intruding Cauchy distribution to generate random control parameters and simplifying the proportion function and threshold functions. Subsequently, we test the performance of new IDE via CEC 2014 benchmark suite of single objective real-parameter numerical optimization. In addition, we apply it to solve a ship stowage planning problem in which the objective function is minimizing the stability deviation of the ship. The numerical results demonstrate the good performance of new IDE on solve these two kinds of optimization problems.