AdaGuiDE: An adaptive and guided differential evolution for continuous optimization problems

Differential evolution (DE) has been proven as a simple yet powerful meta-heuristic algorithm on tackling continuous optimization problems. Nevertheless most existing DE methods still suffer from certain drawbacks including the use of ineffective mechanisms to adjust mutation strategies and their control parameters that may possibly mislead the search directions, and also the lack of intelligent guidance and reset mechanisms to escape from local optima. Therefore, to enhance the adaptability of DE-based search frameworks and the robustness on optimizing complex problems full of local optima, an adaptive and guided differential evolution (AdaGuiDE) algorithm is proposed. Essentially, the adaptability of the AdaGuiDE search framework is enhanced by three schemes to iteratively refine the search behaviour at two different levels. At the macroscopic level, the AdaGuiDE search framework revises the existing adaptive mechanism for selecting appropriate DE search strategies by counting the actual contributions in terms of solution quality. In addition, the adaption strategy is extended to the microscopic level where a penalty-based guided DE search is employed to guide the search escaping from local optima through temporarily penalizing the local optima and their neighborhood. Furthermore, a systematic boundary revision scheme is introduced to dynamically adjust the search boundary for locating any potential regions of interest during the search. For a rigorous evaluation of the proposed search framework, the AdaGuiDE algorithm is compared against other well-known meta-heuristic approaches on three sets of benchmark functions involving different dimensions in which the AdaGuiDE algorithm attained remarkable results especially on the high-dimensional and complex optimization problems. More importantly, the proposed AdaGuiDE framework shed lights on many possible directions to further enhance the adaptability of the underlying DE-based search strategies in tackling many challenging real-world applications.