A triple population adaptive differential evolution

The Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is one of the most efficient algorithms for complex numerical optimization. However, the nature of differential mutation and crossover hinders the individuals from a major change and always guides them toward their superior neighbors. There's a lack of useful directional information to help the population escape from early convergence. To solve the above problem, this paper proposes a novel Triple-population-based Adaptive Differential Evolution (TPADE) to enhance the evolutionary efficiency in solving various complex numerical optimization problems. First, a population division method with symmetrical linear reduction is designed to divide the parent population of each iteration into three sub-populations of different sizes, i.e., superior sub-population, medium sub-population, and inferior sub-population. Each sub-population adopts distinct differential mutation and crossover operators to maintain balanced search directions. Second, a superior-trial-preserved selection mechanism is proposed to screen useful directional information to guide the next iteration of evolution. Third, an effective parameter adaptation strategy is designed with the linear population size reduction strategy to avoid redundant search. Experiments are then conducted to show that the TPADE exhibits well performance compared with eleven state-of-the-art DE variants, CEC winners, and their variants on the CEC'2014, CEC'2017, and CEC'2022 benchmark suites. The C++ source code of TPADE can be downloaded from https://github.com/DoubleGong/TPADE.