Investigating Multi-View Differential Evolution for solving constrained engineering design problems

► A Multi-View Differential Evolution algorithm (MVDE) was developed. ► Multi-View is a different way of search that can be used in other metaheuristics. ► MVDE was tested in largely studied constrained engineering design problems. ► MVDE’s results are compared with those of some state-of-the-art metaheuristics. ► Results show that MVDE is competitive with the best metaheuristics compared. Several constrained and unconstrained optimization problems have been adequately solved over the years thanks to advances in the metaheuristics area. In the last decades, different metaheuristics have been proposed employing new ideas, and hybrid algorithms that improve the original metaheuristics have been developed. One of the most successfully employed metaheuristics is the Differential Evolution. In this paper it is proposed a Multi-View Differential Evolution algorithm (MVDE) in which several mutation strategies are applied to the current population to generate different views at each iteration. The views are then merged according to the winner-takes-all paradigm, resulting in automatic exploration/exploitation balance. MVDE was tested to solve a set of well-known constrained engineering design problems and the obtained results were compared to those from many state-of-the-art metaheuristics. Results show that MVDE was very competitive in the considered problems, largely outperforming several of the compared algorithms.