Adaptive differential evolution algorithm with a pheromone-based learning strategy for global continuous optimization

Abstract Differential evolution algorithm (DE) is a well-known population-based method for solving continuous optimization problems. It has a simple structure and is easy to adapt to a wide range of applications. However, with suitable population sizes, its performance depends on the two main control parameters: scaling factor (F ) and crossover rate (CR). The classical DE method can achieve high performance by a time-consuming tunning process or a sophisticated adaptive control implementation. We propose in this paper an adaptive differential evolution algorithm with a pheromone-based learning strategy (ADE-PS) inspired by ant colony optimization (ACO). The ADE-PS embeds a pheromone-based mechanism that manages the probabilities associated with the partition values of F and CR. It also introduces a resetting strategy to reset the pheromone at a specific time to unlearn and relearn the progressing search. The preliminary experiments find a suitable number of subintervals (ns) for partitioning the control parameter ranges and the reset period (rs) for resetting the pheromone. Then the comparison experiments evaluate ADE-PS using the suitable ns and rs against some adaptive DE methods in the literature. The results show that ADE-PS is more reliable and outperforms several well-known methods in the literature.