Adaptive Differential Evolution Algorithm Based on Fitness Landscape Characteristic

Differential evolution (DE) is a simple, effective, and robust algorithm, which has demonstrated excellent performance in dealing with global optimization problems. However, different search strategies are designed for different fitness landscape conditions to find the optimal solution, and there is not a single strategy that can be suitable for all fitness landscapes. As a result, developing a strategy to adaptively steer population evolution based on fitness landscape is critical. Motivated by this fact, in this paper, a novel adaptive DE based on fitness landscape (FL-ADE) is proposed, which utilizes the local fitness landscape characteristics in each generation population to (1) adjust the population size adaptively; (2) generate DE/current-to-pcbest mutation strategy. The adaptive mechanism is based on local fitness landscape characteristics of the population and enables to decrease or increase the population size during the search. Due to the adaptive adjustment of population size for different fitness landscapes and evolutionary processes, computational resources can be rationally assigned at different evolutionary stages to satisfy diverse requirements of different fitness landscapes. Besides, the DE/current-to-pcbest mutation strategy, which randomly chooses one of the top p% individuals from the archive cbest of local optimal individuals to be the pcbest, is also an adaptive strategy based on fitness landscape characteristic. Using the individuals that are approximated as local optimums increases the algorithm’s ability to explore complex multimodal functions and avoids stagnation due to the use of individuals with good fitness values. Experiments are conducted on CEC2014 benchmark test suit to demonstrate the performance of the proposed FL-ADE algorithm, and the results show that the proposed FL-ADE algorithm performs better than the other seven highly performing state-of-art DE variants, even the winner of the CEC2014 and CEC2017. In addition, the effectiveness of the adaptive population mechanism and DE/current-to-pcbest mutation strategy based on landscape fitness proposed in this paper are respectively verified.