A vectorized bimodal distribution based micro differential evolution algorithm (VB-mDE)

Micro differential evolution (mDE) refers to algorithms that evolve with a small population to search for good solutions. Although mDEs are very useful for resource-constrained optimization tasks, the research on mDEs is still limited. In this paper, we propose a new mDE, i.e., vectorized bimodal distribution based mDE (called VB-mDE). The main idea is to employ a vectorized bimodal distribution parameter adjustment mechanism in mDE for performance enhancement. Specifically, in the VB-mDE, two important control parameters, i.e., scale factor F and crossover rate C⁢R, are adjusted by bimodal Cauchy distribution. At the same time, to increase the population diversity, the scale factor F is vectorized. The proposed VB-mDE is evaluated on the CEC2014 benchmark functions and compared with the state-of-the-art mDEs and normal DEs. The results show that the proposed VB-mDE has advantages in terms of solution accuracy and convergence speed.