The Hybrid Differential Evolution with Dynamic Scaling Mutation and Wrapper Local Search for Optimization Problems

In this paper, an improved hybrid Differential Evolution (DE) is proposed to enhance optimization performance by cooperating Dynamic Scaling Mutation (DSM) and Wrapper Local Search (WLS) schemes. When evolution speed is standstill, DSM can improve searching ability to achieve better balance between exploitation and exploration in the search space. Furthermore, WLS can disturb individuals to fine tune the searching range around and then properly find better solutions in the evolution progress. The effective particle encoding representation named Particle Segment Operation-Machine Assignment (PSOMA) that we previously published is also applied to always produce feasible candidate solutions for hybrid DE model to solve the Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSP). To test the performance of the proposed hybrid method, the experiments contain five frequently used CEC 2005 numerical functions and three representative FJSP benchmarks for single-objective and multi-objective optimization verifications, respectively. Compare the proposed method with the other related published algorithms, the simulation results indicate that our proposed method exhibits better performance for solving most the test functions for single-objective problems. In addition, the wide range of Pareto-optimal solutions and the more Gantt chart diversities can be obtained for the multi-objective FJSP in practical decision-making considerations.