Self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm with dynamic fitness-ranking mutation and pheromone strategy

Differential evolution (DE) is a population-based optimization algorithm widely used to solve a variety of continuous optimization problems. The self-adaptive DE algorithm improves the DE by encoding individual parameters to produce and propagate better solutions. This paper proposes a self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm with dynamic fitness-ranking mutation and pheromone strategy (SDE-FMP). The algorithm introduces the dynamical mutation operation using the fitness rank of the individuals to divide the population into three groups and then select groups and their vectors with adaptive probabilities to create a mutant vector. Mutation and crossover operations use the encoded scaling factor and the crossover rate values in a target vector to generate the corresponding trial vector. The values are changed according to the pheromone when the trial vector is inferior in the selection, whereas the pheromone is increased when the trial vector is superior. In addition, the algorithm also employs the resetting operation to unlearn and relearn the dominant pheromone values in the progressing search. The proposed SDE-FMP algorithm using the suitable resetting periods is compared with the well-known adaptive DE algorithms on several test problems. The results show that SDE-FMP can give high-precision solutions and outperforms the compared methods.