A Multi-Strategy Differential Evolution Algorithm with Adaptive Similarity Selection Rule

The differential evolution (DE) algorithm is a simple and efficient population-based evolutionary algorithm. In DE, the mutation strategy and the control parameter play important roles in performance enhancement. However, single strategy and fixed parameter are not universally applicable to problems and evolution stages with diverse characteristics; besides, the weakness of the advanced DE optimization framework, called selective-candidate framework with similarity selection rule (SCSS), is found by focusing on its single strategy and fixed parameter greedy degree (GD) setting. To address these problems, we mainly combine the multiple candidates generation with multi-strategy (MCG-MS) and the adaptive similarity selection (ASS) rule. On the one hand, in MCG-MS, two symmetrical mutation strategies, “DE/current-to-pbest-w/1” and designed “DE/current-to-cbest-w/1”, are utilized to build the multi-strategy to produce two candidate individuals, which prevents the over-approximation of the candidate in SCSS. On the other hand, the ASS rule provides the individual selection mechanism for multi-strategy to determine the offspring from two candidates, where parameter GD is designed to increase linearly with evolution to maintain diversity at the early evolution stage and accelerate convergence at the later evolution stage. Based on the advanced algorithm jSO, replacing its offspring generation strategy with the combination of MCG-MS and ASS rule, this paper proposes multi-strategy differential evolution algorithm with adaptive similarity selection rule (MSDE-ASS). It combines the advantages of two symmetric strategies and has an efficient individual selection mechanism without parameter adjustment. MSDE-ASS is verified under the Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2017 competition test suite on real-parameter single-objective numerical optimization, and the results indicate that, of the 174 cases in total, it wins in 81 cases and loses in 30 cases, and it has the smallest performance ranking value, of 3.05. Therefore, MSDE-ASS stands out compared to the other state-of-the-art DEs.